Laptop Dilemma
December 23, 2006 Filed in: Personal
Those of you who have been with this blog for a while
know about my trusty PowerBook G3 that has been
serving me since 2000. Six years is a long time
to keep a laptop, but its been a hard worker. I
also have some sentimental attachment to the
machine due to it being the first Macintosh
computer I ever owned. Unfortunately, I fear
it's life of usefulness is coming to an end.
It all started about four years ago when my laptop shorted out due to a damaged power converter. Actually, it kind of fried. If you've ever smelled the lovely aroma of burnt electronics, you know what I mean. Strangely enough, the machine booted up about an hour later, but, with no power converter, its usefulness was obviously limited. We talked about replacing it that night, but all we could have afforded was an iBook G3 – not much of an improvement.
Instead, we bought a new power cord and converter. Shortly after this, we bought a new battery because I was only getting about 45 minutes to an hour of battery life at a time. We never did replace the laptop. The iBooks moved from G3s to G4s. PowerMac G5s were released (which we got one of). The Intel transition was announced and completed, and my PowerBook G3 kept chugging along as it passed its sixth birthday and approached its seventh.
In the last couple of months, though, things have been going downhill quickly. My PowerBook has been regularly locking up while running Pages, forcing me to change my workflow to include MS Word on my desktop, so I can be reasonably sure I can work on my laptop on a document if I need to. Keynote is basically inoperable, and PowerPoint runs with all the speed of a snail caught in molasses going uphill. To top things off, I'm only getting about 30 minutes of battery life per charge, and the battery monitor doesn't seem to know exactly how much charge its carrying.
Apple's current laptops look very tempting, but I'm much more interesting in the MacBook Pro end of the lineup due to the inclusion of dedicated graphics cards (which I think could make a big difference within the next couple of Keynote releases). Unfortunately, my wife is adamant that there is no way we can afford a new laptop at this time. It's possible that I could bump the memory in my G3 to 1 GB, and we could get another new battery, but that's $300+ spent on a machine that probably wouldn't fetch that amount on eBay.
Last year, I lucked out on a big presentation I gave downtown, but I've been having to rely on luck or borrowing other people's laptops (which brings up a whole separate set of issues) for too long. I don't want to spend any more money on maintaining my G3 at this point. I don't even know if those purcahses will really help the problem, but I don't see what choice I have.
In the face of so many global problems and issues I know others are dealing with, I know this must seem insignificant, but it does matter to me that my laptop is quickly becoming essentially useless – especially given the amount of public speaking I'm going to be doing in the coming year. Oh well. Here's hoping that some more luck rolls this way in 2007.
It all started about four years ago when my laptop shorted out due to a damaged power converter. Actually, it kind of fried. If you've ever smelled the lovely aroma of burnt electronics, you know what I mean. Strangely enough, the machine booted up about an hour later, but, with no power converter, its usefulness was obviously limited. We talked about replacing it that night, but all we could have afforded was an iBook G3 – not much of an improvement.
Instead, we bought a new power cord and converter. Shortly after this, we bought a new battery because I was only getting about 45 minutes to an hour of battery life at a time. We never did replace the laptop. The iBooks moved from G3s to G4s. PowerMac G5s were released (which we got one of). The Intel transition was announced and completed, and my PowerBook G3 kept chugging along as it passed its sixth birthday and approached its seventh.
In the last couple of months, though, things have been going downhill quickly. My PowerBook has been regularly locking up while running Pages, forcing me to change my workflow to include MS Word on my desktop, so I can be reasonably sure I can work on my laptop on a document if I need to. Keynote is basically inoperable, and PowerPoint runs with all the speed of a snail caught in molasses going uphill. To top things off, I'm only getting about 30 minutes of battery life per charge, and the battery monitor doesn't seem to know exactly how much charge its carrying.
Apple's current laptops look very tempting, but I'm much more interesting in the MacBook Pro end of the lineup due to the inclusion of dedicated graphics cards (which I think could make a big difference within the next couple of Keynote releases). Unfortunately, my wife is adamant that there is no way we can afford a new laptop at this time. It's possible that I could bump the memory in my G3 to 1 GB, and we could get another new battery, but that's $300+ spent on a machine that probably wouldn't fetch that amount on eBay.
Last year, I lucked out on a big presentation I gave downtown, but I've been having to rely on luck or borrowing other people's laptops (which brings up a whole separate set of issues) for too long. I don't want to spend any more money on maintaining my G3 at this point. I don't even know if those purcahses will really help the problem, but I don't see what choice I have.
In the face of so many global problems and issues I know others are dealing with, I know this must seem insignificant, but it does matter to me that my laptop is quickly becoming essentially useless – especially given the amount of public speaking I'm going to be doing in the coming year. Oh well. Here's hoping that some more luck rolls this way in 2007.