How would you handle this eBay problem with G4 iBook?

Ok... I am having the absolute WORST luck with my two eBay Macs I just bought last week.
The Power Mac MDD 1.25 I bought has a problem recognizing the RAM.

And the 1.07 iBook freezes constantly!

I've run all the utilities, tried taking out the extra ram, even re-booted the operating system.

The only thing I did to "alter" the iBook from it's original state was update the installed Tiger OS X to the latest version.

Now it will work fine for a while, then completely freeze up, and it has been doing this ever since about two hours after I received it!

So I emailed the seller twice, and finally got a response.

He basically said something to the effect of "It was fine when it left here. If it freezes after the update, not my problem."

I told him that I'm sure it worked fine when it left... But I have a hard time believing that doing something as simple as updating the operating system would cause it to freeze up intermittently.

Everything I've read suggests a faulty hard drive. It's a 30 gig internal, and I'm assuming it's probably the stock unit. I've also read that hard drives eventually wear out after 3 years or so.. And given the computer was probably made in early 2004, that sounds about right.

What would you folks do? Press for a refund? Partial refund for hard drive replacement? Or am I just stuck with a lemon that I immediately have to sink money into to make it work right?

I'm a little nervous that the seller isn't going to stand behind it based on the tone of his email...

Did you use paypal? If so you can file a dispute with them. You shouldn't have to pay for someone else's junk if he said it ran fine. Maybe you can backout the update to see if it works???

T

mac747 said:

Did you use paypal? If so you can file a dispute with them. You shouldn't have to pay for someone else's junk if he said it ran fine. Maybe you can backout the update to see if it works???

T

Click to expand...

Worth a try... How do you "back out" of an update?

And yes, I did use Paypal. I hope I don't have to play "hard ball" with the seller... But if he won't budge, I may have no choice. The seller seems to have good feedback overall and is a "power seller" with lots of used Mac notebooks for sale. Seems like he'd just say "fine, send it back and I'll refund minus shipping..." But I get the feeling he might not be so friendly...