A couple months ago I installed new hard drive in Chey’s laptop, a tangerine iBook of the clamshell variety. In the process I managed (why does this sound like a confession to me?) to fracture the ribbon between the trackpad and the mainboard, disabling the trackpad button.

So, after trying to fix it and failing, I went to eBay and acquired a new palmrest/trackpad unit for the computer.

She got an airport card today, so I installed both the new trackpad and the card at the same time.

Well, it turns out that while the new trackpad button does work, I’ve managed to mess something up so that when you depress the button, it doesn’t pop back up. So, it stays in a clicked position. Exceedingly irritating.

Anyway, it turns out that in OS 10.3, which is what she has installed on her computer, there is a menu to control how to use the trackpad. You can enable clicking on the trackpad itself. So, I did that, and I think I might even like that a little better then the button option. Well, especially because it works and the button is sticky. Now I just wish there was a setting to turn the button off, because now occassionally the button depresses, and have to pop it back up by pressing on the bottom of the case.

Were we wealthy, I’d have a new iBook on her lap, pronto. Old computers are very frustrating as they slowly fall to pieces.