[disleximac]

The Hard drive in my daughter's(MAC) powerbook G4( which we purchased in August 04)just died.
One of her friends powerbook also lost its hard drive over Christmas. It's about the same age.
I lost my hard drive on my" ole" powermac G3 after 5+ years.
College students leave their computers on all the time; in case some one wants to know where they are. I turn mine off when not in use.
Are they burning their hard drives up; or are these drives defective?
My Bondi blue i-mac (10 years old) is still running with 8.5 and loved by several youn children.

[VegasACF]

I doubt seriously the hard drives are defective. It's more likely due to a cause that you do not mention: not giving the computers (and their drives) the treatment they require. Just because they're laptops doesn't mean they should be thrown around. I know, I know, you want to think that you've raised your daughter "right" and that she knows how to treat a computer, especially a Mac. But (I'm guessing from your post) she's in college. Things happen. And a drive, if it's in use, is very susceptible to problems, regardless in what kind of enclosure it resides.

The hard drive in my PowerBook 520c (circa 1993) has never failed. The hard drive in my year-old PowerBook bit the dust when it was suddenly jarred by my wife bumping the table on which it sat, which caused it to fall about a foot onto a very padded chair. Had the PowerBook been asleep or better protected I would have had no problems. But it wasn't, and I learned a lesson.

The upside is I got a larger, faster drive put in it, and (thanks to frequent backups) haven't looked back. The computer hasn't been turned off for more than a day in the year and a half since this happened. And the only restarts have been after an upgrade requires one.

[D0C_Hol1d@y]

I seriously doubt keeping the machine on all the time had anything to do with it. I keep all of my machines on. My powermac has been on since March of 2000 and the drives are perfeect.

[Nytemagik]

As the father of 5 daughters, I can atest that even with the best intentions, kids always seem to do "stuff" to their computers.

I have 8 in the house, all Macs and have only had 1 hard drive crash. It was a very old system and was in a room where the air was getting a lot of dust. My fault.

Count your blessings, hard drives are cheap, unlike motherboards, LCD screens, etc.

John

[disleximac]

http://images.techguy.org/smilies/smile.gifhard drive paid for under apple care. Fortunately I gave my daughter an external hard drive for Christmas so she had backed up all her important files. Every thing returned perfectly. Every one remember to back up.