I’m in the middle of upgrading my laptop — iBook, actually — after the previous version fell victim to a relatively common problem in which the display would flicker when the laptop was open at certain angles.

The new version is faster – 1.2 GHz against 800 MHz, has a more advanced processor – G4 against G3 – and a number of other improvements. It’s even cheaper, coming in at C$1249 instead of C$1999. But it doesn’t feel as good. The plastic is more obvious, and the bezels around the display look junky. Perhaps this is a little silly, but my enjoyment of the machine is just a teeny bit diminished by this. It’s too bad.

Meanwhile, another glitch has turned up, though this is my own fault. Just before sending the old iBook in for repairs I backed up the content of the laptop’s hard drive. Now it’s time to restore the content–onto the new machine–and I’m having trouble doing it. Apple has a very nice process set up when you start up the machine in which you are asked if you are upgrading from a prior Mac, and, if you are, you are given instructions on how to migrate your data from one machine to the other. The only problem is that it assumes you still have access to the old machine, which of course I do not. I’ll have to try another approach. But not tonight.

Later: It turns out I can also migrate–not restore–to the laptop using the backup image as long as I can mount the image on the laptop. Right now the image is sitting on the upper partition of a 160 Mb drive and can’t be seen by the laptop, because when I mount the drives in target mode on the desktop, only the first 128 Mb of the drive are visible. I have a driver on the hard drive which makes the entire drive available in regular use, but it doesn’t engage in target mode. I’ll work around this…later.