Monday, April 22, 2002

CRAP! After a year+ of heavy use, my PowerBook G4 died. The battery is loose enough that any movement of the machine causes it to lose power unless hooked up to the wall. This was one of the first TiBook's produced (there is actually a little tag inside the cover that indicates that it was #40 -- whatever that means) -- it was sent to a CompUSA store as the floor demo unit. In any case, it has a number of problems associated with very early units (the revised versions are much, much better). Thankfully, I picked up a CompUSA 3 year Super Duper LapTop (Including Screen) warranty. Not only will all of my power related woes be fixed, but so will the keyboard, the CD drive, the CPU fan, and the huge scratch in my display, thereby paying for the warranty several times over. (Honestly, I none of the flaws with the unit are things I would blame Apple for-- it was a very early unit and I have used it hard.) I'm somewhat in shock without the machine. Thankfully, no data lost, but this does mean that I don't have a portable computing environment and I'm sort of stuck with whatever I happen to have on whatever machine I log into. Portable FireWire hard drives are incredibly useful in this context, but I was bummed to discover that mine is old enough to not support booting. 5:20:11 PM