I picked up an old 17" screen from my parent's house this evening so I'm atleast back up and running on the laptop, even if it is through the blurry, curved, low-res ViewSonic beast. 1280x1024 isn't that much smaller, but I notice it.

There were five parts that the repair place thought they might need: the LCD ribbon, the LCD inverter, the mainboard, the LCD panel and the keyboard bezel. Why they need the keyboard is beyond me, unless they wanted to fix a few broken things on the "inside". From where I sit, it is fine.

The motherboard is over $500, and the LCD panel is $1900, which makes them excessively overpriced. I have ordered the LCD ribbon and LCD inverter for $200 combined and expect them in the next 2-4 weeks. If it's not one of these problems then we'll end up getting a new laptop, but I'd rather not bomb down $3,200 for an R52 (the successor to my R40, and the laptop Steve's getting on Wednesday) which has 500MHz over mine, and not much else. The 1.5GHz is plenty powerful enough, and gigabit ethernet isn't needed. It'd be a waste of money that I could be spending on big screen(s) instead :)

The Mac has been fun to play with, and will continue to be over the next 4 weeks; heck, we've paid for it so we may as well enjoy it. It'll get a workout at my mum's 50th this weekend, where iTunes will provide the audio entertainment, and anytime I'm offsite (read: not at home of the office) I'll need the Powerbook, but the little annoyances made it much less desirable than I expected.

I admit, having things setup the way I like them on Ubuntu does help though.