Thank you Tom (& Wikipedia!).

Bah. My iBook is not doing well, and I can't afford a new one at the moment.

What it's doing is making a clicking sound. It clicks continiously at slightly more than one click per second. It's not coming from the speakers, but is something mechanical inside. It starts clicking the moment I power it on (i.e. before the OS loads). So far, I've been afraid to let it run like that.

I'm at a loss as to what is making the sound. How many moving parts are there in an iBook? There's the CD drive, the HD drive, the CD and HD read-write heads, and the cooling fan.... I don't think it's any of those, but what else could it be?

I'd take it to an Apple repair place, but I don't think it's worth spending much money on as I'm gonna buy a new one soon. (It's a 900 mhz G3.)

Well, if you are comfortable pulling the machine apart I'd go through each scenario and disconnect an item each time to narrow it down. I'd put money on the hard drive to be honest. Those are what fail most often. The fans tend not to click at that low of a rate. It could be the CD. If it is a tray loading CD drive then try placing some light pressure against the drive door while it is clicking and see if you can feel the mechanism shifting at all.

But yeah, I'd guess HD with CD as a close second. I would certainly do a full drive backup immediately as a precaution.

I'm with ND. Clicking at that speed sounds like a hard drive to me.

Wreckin' freckin' IS people installed some new web filters on the company servers over the weekend. Luckily, this place is making it through (and, strangely, so is youtube!) but bloglines is now blocked. Any suggestions for other blog aggregators I should try?

Jon, you can try the Google Blog Reader. Our webfilters block a lot of stuff but they seem to let everything associated with Google through (for the moment, she adds darkly).

Thanks! I can access it so I'll give it a try.

Don't know if this has been mentioned but couldn't find it in a search, so for all you Mac users, follow this [link] to go to the BitsOnWheels site. The "first 100% Native B1tT0rrent client for the Macintosh."

Okay, techies....

My phone bill makes me vomit, and despite the incredibly annoying song in the commercials, Vonage is starting to tempt me. So....

Any and all of you who've had experience with internet phone service, what is your experience? Is that price they give (about $25 a month) real? Any surprise costs? How much of an initial investment is required to make it work? Can we transfer over our current phone number?

My Vonage experience was one of terrible call quality and even worse customer service, originally summarized here:

Jessica "Buffistechnology 2: You Made Her So She Growls?" Mar 5, 2005 3:57:38 pm PST