Powerbook: erratic startup, laboured noises & crashes with internet connect

Question

Hi,
Any advice would be greatly appreciated:
I have a Powerbook G4 and I have been running OSX (10.4.3) on it for a while now and I haven't had trouble until recently.
I have a suspicion my internet connection is somehow confliciting with the operating system. I don't know if this is a powerbook or a tiger problem.
Basically I was busy attaching a file to an email when the computer went into this strange dazed mode of being unable to do anything. It seemed to have frozen. I couldn't force quit Mail (or any application) so I shut down the powerbook using the power button on the keyboard.
When loading up again it took much longer to boot up. Sometimes it never got passed the twirling circle of lines at startup.
When the powerbook did load up it went through a few stages of blue screens - sometimes it even went into a second round of loading up before going into the OS.
When it did boot up I found that when connecting to the internet it immediately froze.
The computer is also making a strange repetitive, laboured noise.
It is erratic - booting up sometimes and other times struggling for so long that I have to shut it down by means of the power button.
The only two things I have done differently recently are:
1) enabled my bluetooth and had some files transfered from two different mobile phones and;
2) connected a stranger's iPod to my mac - which hasn't been connected to my computer before
Not sure if any of these could have caused such discontent with my otherwise trusty Powerbook?
Is this the end?
Powerbook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

Hi, Warwick, and welcome to Apple Discussions.
The computer is also making a strange repetitive, laboured noise.
This is the salient fact; all else is just details. First make sure there is no disc in your optical drive. If that drive is empty, what you are left with is a classic signal of hard drive mechanical failure. Immediately, before you do anything else, get to work copying all the important un-backed-up data on the hard drive to other storage media. You may not make it all the way through this process before the drive dies entirely, so identify the highest priority files before you begin, and back them up first. There's no telling whether your hard drive will last another month, week, day, hour, or minute, so don't put this off. It will go fastest and most easily if you back your files up to an external FireWire hard drive, so if you don't have one already, this may be a very good time to buy one.
Hard drives are mechanical devices, and sometimes they just fail. You probably did nothing at all to cause the failure, and it certainly had nothing to do with the internet.
Replacing the hard drive in a Powerbook is an easy ten-minute procedure, for which instructions are printed right in your Powerbook G4 Getting Started user's manual. Replacement drives are available from scores of online vendors and bricks-and-mortar retailers, in capacities from 20-30GB up to 160GB and at prices from about $65 to more than $200USD. $100 gets you the pick of many midrange, midspeed, midpriced drives. I can't suggest where you might want to shop in the UK.