Does anybody have any personal experiences with PowerBookResQ? I would love to ship off my iBook for a HD increase, as 30GB is waaaaaaaaaaayyyyy too small. But before I ship anything to any company, I would like to hear of some honest to goodness customer experiences. Thanks in advance!

I tried to deal with them on an ibook HD replacement. It never happened because they were incapable of the most basic business: They were supposed to email an estimate to me. Didn't happen. When I called again, no one knew anything about it. Second attempt - same thing. Days wasted. Barnyard animals.

I wound up with an outfit called Wegener Media. They were very good with regard to the above type of thing, so I told two of my friends about them, and the three of us sent them our laptops. Well, they screwed up all three jobs. They did a pathetic hack job opening the cases. My iBook G4 came back with hash marks all along the left front rim, and some kind of glue smeared all over it. One of my friends' original iBook, which has a metallic case, was actually bent in the same area, plus they forgot to do an additional repair altogether, and it had to be sent back again. The other friend's Powerbook came back without the 1 gig memory stick he ordered and paid for. All three took much longer than promised, and no offer of compensation for the delay.
I don't know who to recommend, but you should certainly stay away from these two.

I had 100 gig, 5400rpm Seagate installed in my iBook G4. I've had no problems with it, and it's warranteed for 5 years! - but be advised: These large cap drives run HOT. The whole machine gets very hot. And despite what they say about power usage, your battery will only last maybe two thirds as long. A friend of mine went for a Toshiba 4200rpm 80 gig, and that runs hot also. You can get a longer lasting, after-market battery, and the heat is apparently not beyond the rated tolerances. But I think a 4200/60 might be the way to go, assuming the 60 runs cooler like the 40. (Seems likely, but I can't attest to it.) As for the extra spindle speed, it may help the big drives deliver decent seek times, but you don't experience this as faster.

Wow! Thank you so much for the info! That was so much more than what I was looking for and told me a lot more than what I was expecting....thank you so so much for telling me not to use either of those companies. I really trust a local re-seller here in Houston, so guess I will go with them if I upgrade hard drives. For this time, I think I'll just stick with the 30 GB and carry around an external 2.5". It's not that big.

The best information of all was the fact that the bigger hard drives will run hot and kill my battery faster. I guess I hadn't taken that into consideration, and to be honest, and never even thought of that. Battery life on my iBook is so important that I even carry 3 batteries, one in the iBook and 2 spares. Right now I average around 3 to 4 hours on a battery depending on what I'm doing, and I never even thought about a hard drive using more power.

Once again, thank you very much for the assistance on my questions. I'm still pretty new to the Mac world and I keep kicking myself wondering why it took me so long to switch! The best thing is how friendly the people are on the forums...

Once again, thanks!

I just made use of this service and I would not recommend these guys.

First, they called to ask me the admin password, even though I had written it on the form, included in the box. Not a great confidence-builder.

Then the returned my laptop WITHOUT my data transferred to the new drive, and WITHOUT the external drive enclosure that I ordered (and had been invoiced for). This meant that I could not even do my own data transfer.

I have called & left a message but they haven't called me back.

Save yourself the heartache and use a local dealer to do this for you. It'll be quicker too, because you won't have to wait for DHL to pick up & deliver the laptop.