iBook 900mhz G3 Problems, Again!

[Joe Sporleder]

Has anyone on this list experienced the problems with the previous 
generation of iBooks that have been talked about on Mac news sites 
recently? I have a 900mhz G3 iBook with 640MB of RAM, Combo Drive and 
40GB HD. It always seems to me that it gets a bit too hot, even by 
iBook and PowerBook standards. The LCD Screen will start doing some 
strange flickering and then everything will freeze completely. 
Sometimes Panther will go into a kernel panic and talk about doing a 
system dump, but most of the time it will not even get that far.

I had to send it in after I had it about 4 months, under AppleCare, 
same symptoms as now. According to the work order that came back with 
it, the logic board and the hard drive were replaced. It looks like I'm 
going to have to send it again, and it's still got 3 months or so under 
the 1 year warranty. Fortunately this time and last time, I had fairly 
recent backups to my G4 tower at work (thank God for Carbon Copy 
Cloner!).

I'm beginning to wonder if portable computers are for me. This is my 
4th Macintosh, and the only one I've had to send in for service repair, 
let alone twice! I'm wondering how many times I'll have to backup and 
restore with this one. I've given the warranty a good workout so far, 
and am wondering if I can expect the same "workout" with the extended 
AppleCare. Any correlations between hard drive size? I've heard of some 
folks have had better luck with the 60GB HD models, than the 30-40GB 
equipped iBook. I'm not sure how much of this is fact or rumor, but I'd 
like to know if there is any correlation here.

Joe