so my poor baby laptop, which i love to little tiny pieces, is getting old and crotchety. it’s had some problems. it lost a fan, so it gets really warm. its dvd drive started flaking about two years ago, and a couple of months ago it finally died. its hard disk is both slow (4200 rpms) and tiny (60 GB). it gets hot, and it’s only got a gig of ram, and i can only run a couple of fat applications simultaneously — if i have both firefox and safari open (as i often do), i can just forget about running quicktime player without the fan kicking on. nonetheless, i’ve had this laptop for ages, it’s an original 17″ powerbook G4 and i literally ordered it the day it was announced at MacWorld, and it’s been such a good computer, which is why i’m tremendously sad to announce that it’s dying.

a fan i could replace, a hard disk i could upgrade, and a dvd-rom i could fix (none of those cheaply, which is why i’ve been putting them off for ages, but technically fixable)… but now it’s got a hosed up USB port that appears to have fried a USB hub, and that’s on the logic board, and *that* basically is the computer. so that leaves, like, the keyboard, power adapter, and display working well.

i love my poor little baby laptop. she’s been so good to me. :( i’m so sad!

Bestickered laptop

nonetheless, i am a pragmatist. i understand that a dying laptop is not much good for using for doing computery things, and that is why i just — sigh — dropped $1800 on a new iMac at the Apple Store. i think i saved a whole $50 with my student discount. hooray.

  • iMac 17-inch, Intel Core 2 Duo
    • SuperDrive 8X (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
    • 2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM – 2x1GB
    • 250GB Serial ATA drive
    • 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
    • Ships by: Apr 30 – May 2
    • Delivers by: May 1 – May 3
  • Canon PIXMA MP460 Photo All-in-One Printer
    • Ships by: Apr 27 – Apr 30
    • Delivers by: Apr 30 – May 1

(the only reason there’s a printer on there is because it was $110 with a $100 rebate, and my old printer driver — which works only grudgingly under panther — does not work at all with tiger so far as i can tell. at least the new one is smaller. probably quieter, too.)

i guess i’ll freecycle the old printer. my ancient G4 quicksilver, Nigel, i might as well just freecycle, if anyone’ll even take it. it takes up so much room and i never use it anyways — no point; shiny’s much faster than it, and it’s crashy. at least this is an excuse to clean some stuff out of the office, i guess.

i’m just so sad poor shiny is dying. i know i shouldn’t anthropomorphize my computers, but i do anyways. all my computers i work with most frequently have personalities, so i pat them and tell them to cheer up when they’re grumpy. i used to always go into the machine room at U of C and pat plaisance and tell her things like “we have some nice new memory for you, sweetie.” (plaisance was my little baby Sun Fire 6800. i think i was the only one who liked her…she was kind of whiny and crashy. it wasn’t her fault, though; she was a Rev 1.) i also pat my cars and call them good girls. honestly… it’s not so much anthropomorphization as it is sort of canispomorphization: i talk to inanimate objects like they’re pet dogs. anyways. point is, i’m sad my favorite little laptop is dying. i expect that by the time the boxes show up at my door i will be excited, but for now, i’m mostly just mourning.

i am handling the finances like so: i signed up for the promotional credit, the Juniper Apple Visa with iTunes Rewards. hey, i just spent $1800 on a new mac; the least they can do is give me a damn $25 iTunes gift card. :P at least this way it doesn’t interfere with my plans for repaying the other cards, and i get three months to whittle it down before there’s a finance charge. so. it ain’t great, but insofar as spending $1800 unexpectedly goes, this is probably not the worst way i could have handled it. (probably not the best either, but at least i did put some thought into it…) it was exactly the “good enough” solution for this (and any other solution would have gotten me mired in worry and anxiety, and that’s no good). and, best of all: this will give me a new Visa card so i won’t have to give Chase any more money (since my current/only Visa is through them), because they are bastards and we hateses them, preciouss. hah, take that, JP Morgan Chase Bank NA! i vote with my credit line…and also my dying computers, apparently.

that said… just, i better not have any unexpected $1000+ purchases for a long while, man. :)