IBook G4 dying- any hope?

My iBook G4 has been fine for the 10 months I've had it.
For the last 2 days, it's been failing to boot up with a different result every time: display seems on but nothing appears; gets stuck at the gray screen; gets stuck when the apple appears; appears as a terminal prompt asking to continue start or use safe mode; desktop appears but either freezes or immediately goes to a window saying that the iBook must be restarted.
After leaving it for a day, it now starts up very slowly and always freezes within 15 minutes. I've run disk utility but it finds no problems with either the disk or the permissions.
Luckily, I was able to back up some critical docs I was working on during one of the windows of life.
Please, any help would be appreciated, especially if there's some way to fix this without sending it in (I'm in Belgium right now and the closest apple store is 3 hours away in London!)
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.3)   1.33 Ghz, 512MB

Your problem may not be as dire as you think. The symptoms you mention sure seem like they are being caused either by corruption in your System or User Cache files, or corruption to the directory. Given the nature of the crashes you probably will have to address the issue of directory corruption first before attempting any other type of maintenance.
Directory corruption (something Disk Utility is not very good at detecting or repairing) is best addressed by Disk Warrior I suggest you look into purchasing it . It's an excellent utility for repairing directory corruption, and IMO a "must have" for the maintenance toolbox.
Other types of maintenance requirements can be handled by OnyX. This freeware utility can correct cache and other problems.
If you use OnyX, please make sure you understand what the program can do (informationfound in the program's Help menu) before using it.
At the time of this posting Disk Warrior's site was not accessible. If so, try this link later - http://www.alsoft.com/
Message was edited by: Hawaiian_Starman

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