Internal hard drive; should I give in?

Question

The two years I've had my 17" PowerBook G4 have been a dream — except when it comes to hard drives. I seem to've had a streak of bad luck with them, as the first TWO hard drives I've had have failed, so I recently bought a new (and bigger...100GB vs. 80) drive and had it installed.

However, at some point I want to sell this laptop and buy a MacBook Pro. I'd get around half the needed money for a MBP from just selling the laptop (+ accessories, restore DVDs, etc.), so I obviously can't do it yet. I'm running off an external hard drive. While this works fine, the external is too small for me to install the software I need to make music, so basically I'm just spinning my wheels unless I finally give in and start using the internal.

What do you think? If I break down and install OS X on the internal hard drive and start using the laptop as a laptop again, will it still be saleable by the time I'm able to sell it? Should I save up for yet another drive, to be installed right before sale?

Answer 1

By the time you finally get around to selling it, it isn't going to be worth much money. You might as well use it as a laptop. Exactly what went wrong with the previous drives? Maybe you just shake the computer too much and broke them. Maybe the laptop has a bad power connection to the internal hard drive. Maybe the drive just got corrupted and it's really fine.