I have a 2002 vintage Powerbook G4 Titanium 1 Ghz. It is still going strong and works well but the battery has a life of about 8 minutes which means it is no longer very mobile. Another thing that keeps this computer from being mobile is that it came with a 60 gig hard drive and when my music is on the internal hard drive I have roughly 3 gigs of available space, which isn’t enough to operate on. That being the case I keep my music on an external hard drive. So, the lack of battery life and the need to be tethered to a drive in order to sync my iPod really limits mobility.
My first thought was to upgrade to a new laptop but the laptop that is more realistically affordable is the new MacBook. I have tested these out in stores and I know several people who have them and while they are neat and new and have some features that I want, the overall performance didn’t seem all that much faster than my current Powerbook. My unscientific tests were done by timing how long applications took to open on both machines and there was a marginal increase in the MacBook.
For those of you not familiar with Apple computers, it would be similar to owning a 2002 Toyota Camry and trading it in for a 2008 Toyota Corolla. While it will be newer and have new features it feels more like a lateral move rather than a straight upgrade.
To make a long story shorter, I decided to upgrade my internal hard drive, replace the battery, and purchase a USB 2 pcimca card bus. In other words, I would give my old Camry a suspension upgrade, and a major tune up.
First I took the back off:

Tip: when using the star wrenches and screws try one size smaller than you think is needed and it may turn out to be a better fit.
I then took out the hard drive and didn’t take any pictures because I didn’t want to cause any static charge.
Once I had the drive in I attempted to format the drive:

It took several attempts and I also needed to put my old hard drive in and create a new duplicate back up copy of that disc because the SilverKeeper program that came with my Lacie hard drive bites big donkey nads (that’s bad).
Tip: Don’t ever use SilverKeeper as a back up program. Sure it will copy your data so that you won’t lose it, but it doesn’t restore your data properly even though it states that it does. I suggest using either SmartBackup (shareware) or Personal Backup by Intego which is a company that I happen to like for some of their other software offerings. I used SmartBackup because it allowed me to use it a few times before purchase and it is also cheaper than Personal Backup.
With SmartBackup the transfer of data was smooth and relatively painless.
See, smiles all around:

As an added bonus, the laptop now runs a bit faster. Probably because of the clean OS install and also the hard drive is a faster RPM than the previous drive. I am now mobile, for the most part. I found out that the USB 2 card buses do not generate sufficient voltage to power iPods, so I need to have the card plugged into an AC outlet. That is okay though because the file transfers are significantly faster than before.