fun times in computer land

Well, it finally happened. My laptop is dying. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t spring for applecare, ’cause it would’ve expired two weeks ago anyway.

Things went wrong last Wednesday; on the way up to D/FW for Thanksgiving, something must’ve died on the logic board. When I opened the iBook up in the hotel, to make sure the wireless router was configured properly, I got bus errors. Much later (after dinner), it looked like the hard drive was bad.

Fast forward to Saturday afternoon, when we get back to Austin: I buy a 250GB external hard drive, and back up the hard drive. Multiple events occur which make me think I’ve blown away both the internal drive and the backup, and I’m up and running again with everything working (mostly). Then I do a hardware test, and the 1G ram stick is bad. So I downgrade to the 512M one that’s left over from a previous upgrade.

And then at work a couple nights ago (Monday night, I think), I notice that the memory count is 512 megs, and not the 768 I expected (since there’s 256M on-board); turns out the onboard ram has died, in addition to everything else that’s gone wrong. So I’m sitting here hoping my laptop will even boot (it did tonight, even though it wasn’t yesterday morning), wishing I had an extra 900 bucks so I could buy a refurbished Mac Book from Apple. A new one would be even better, but I don’t have 2 grand sitting around. Maybe after christmas, I’ll be able to set aside a little chunk of change (in addition to my contribution to the “getting married, have to pay for the wedding” fund) and get something that isn’t on its last legs.

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devlogic

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