My Poor Broken iBook

Like an idiot, I loaned out my iBook to my younger brother. Yes, he broke it, twice. I fixed one of the breaks, but the other is a little harder. The CD tray will not close. I called my local Apple store and they can fix it in house for $210. The money is not the big issue, I bought the iBook used for $700. It is a G3, maybe a 700Mhz. Is it worth it to fix it? Would it be better just to buy an external cd rom drive? If I do that, if I have to re-install the OS, will the laptop boot to the external drive? I need some guidance please. I am open to an IM chat session if anyone has anyadvice they would like to share. Thanks. :biohazard

It's probably only worth the money if you want to hang onto that laptop. If your in the market for another/newer one then don't bother. You can hook up an external and it should boot fine, but you then lose true portability.

baggss said:

It's probably only worth the money if you want to hang onto that laptop. If your in the market for another/newer one then don't bother. You can hook up an external and it should boot fine, but you then lose true portability.

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If you think you want to sell it the machine is effectively useless w/out a CD ROM drive.

If you fix the drive and keep the machine for a year or more then I'd say it's worth it.

Personally I never consider resale value/potential in any of my upgrade or purchace desisions. Computers depreciate so fast. Instead I consider how much longer I will be keeping the computer if I fix/upgrade, etc.

unless you plan on selling it, then who cares about it. an external will do fine.

another factor depends use of your ibook. do you use the CD rom a lot? I don't. I don't watch DVDs or burn CDs. I got my TV and my desktop for that. my ibook is just for school work and surfing the net.

in fact, since 4-5 months of use, i only used the cd rom 2 times. first time was check for hardware defects with the cd they gave me and second was to upload some word docs from a cd. since i got a wireless router, everything has been going through wirelessly

you can buy my ibook for $90 more than buying and installing a new CD-ROM drive from that apple store....here is the link
http://mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29105