Idle Time » Blog Archive » I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD
I did take some notes which I’ll present below, but this isn’t a full how-to. I used iFixIt’s guide plus occasional reference to the official Apple Service Source repair guide (those are not strictly public but can be had from your favorite abandonware site).
This was my second SSD upgrade, as I’d previously replaced my G4 Cube’s hard drive with an SSD. (The pictures on that page show a hard drive because, before the SSD upgrade, I’d replaced the Cube’s hard drive with another hard drive, and that was what I originally documented on that page. Then, after that, when I decided to upgrade to an SSD, I used my own tutorial. iFixIt didn’t exist yet.)
I rather despise working on laptops, though this wasn’t as bad as I’d worried it would be. (Upgrading the memory in my Mac mini was harder. I pointedly did that as soon as the machine arrived so that it would be done and I’d never need to open the machine back up for the rest of its life.)
The thing that motivated me to go forward with it was that the iBook was absolutely filthy. It had been Mom’s, and she was a smoker in her life; she would routinely be smoking a cigarette and working on the computer, and getting so absorbed in the latter that ash would fall from her cigarette onto and into the computer. So I resolved to clean the disassembled parts as well as upgrade the storage.
