It’s official, new MacBooks will be announced next week. I’ve been waiting for these quite a while. My 5-year-old PowerBook G4 has been steadily dying over the past few months. This Sunday — or was it Saturday? — I knew she was finally done.

It must have been Saturday because I had followed a link to a temporary YouTube video from SNL mocking the recent vice presidential debate. Flash has almost always been a difficult thing for my PowerBook to handle, more so in recent versions. YouTube usually does pretty well, many other Flash video sites do not. This time the playback stuttered and limped along. I could sense a general wheezing slowness to every part of the OS. Tinúviel had a failed hard drive.

Backups with SuperDuper! failed repeatedly. No matter what I did I continued to have I/O errors at some level. I gave up on a full backup and concentrated on the Users folder. After deleting several files I had success, and I shut down both the PowerBook and external hard drive with a sigh of relief.

It was time, without a doubt, to say goodbye.

Rumors had been swelling for what seemed like months about new MacBooks. I had heard that October 14th was the date we’d see a refresh. I had a rough couple of days checking rumor sites for any news. Surely, if these new notebooks were to be as drastic a revision as we expected Apple would want to do a big event. But I despaired as each day passed without an invitation. I couldn’t risk buying a new MacBook if new ones were so close, but what if they weren’t? I’m just not capable of living without my own computer.

So, now they’re definitely coming. I’m ordering one as soon as the Apple Store comes back online.

This PowerBook is my first Mac. With my most recent bout of schooling drawing to a close it was time I thought about getting a real job. I would need to create a résumé. I would need to email said résumé to prospective employers. My father thought I might need a notebook.

At the time — 2003 — my computer was a somewhat elderly PC cobbled together from parts I had been hanging onto in some cases for years. It had something in the neighborhood of 15 to 20GB of hard drive space on two different hard drives purchased years apart. I had built the whole damned thing from scratch. Finding a heat sink to fit the oddball motherboard I had purchased took at least 4 tries.

I don’t know what I had decided on a Mac. Not long ago I had railed loudly against the platform to my housemates. I was doing a bit of web design at the time, struggling with CSS. Safari hadn’t yet made any inroads. Firefox was still in its infancy. Neither one existed at all at the time of my ranting (2002). We had Internet Explorer and Netscape. Maybe Opera, but I never touched it. As most of the web designers used Macs, most of the ones who talked the loudest online, I heard a lot about IE5. That it was so much better than anything on PC, and that any problems I was having couldn’t possibly be blamed on it. Maybe I’m exaggerating but one fact is abundantly clear: Coding CSS was a lot harder then than it is now.

So when my father announced over Thanksgiving break that he was going to buy a notebook for me we looked at some Dells and some HPs, but that wasn’t what I really wanted. I must have indicated as much because he asked what I really wanted and I pulled up the iBook page. I distinctly remember him asking if that was what I really wanted because I remember saying “Well, no, what I really want is…” and then pulling up the PowerBook. There was a much bigger difference between the PowerBook G4 and iBook G4 than there is between the MacBook Pro and MacBook, at least there seems to be where I’m sitting.

So, we ordered the PowerBook. It arrived a few days later and I was struck, immediately, at just how goddamned right it was. I’d been using a computer since our first 386 — or was it a 486? — many years ago. I thought I knew how these things worked.

I was wrong. They could be so much better.

Everything was where it was supposed to be. I was used to hunting for things. For just knowing things. I was used to autoexec.bat and config.sys. I was used to the registry. These were the things you grimly accepted on your way to being able to use a computer. But it didn’t have to be.

I can’t remember any sort of learning curve. If anything, there was an un-learning curve. Remarking on the process of switching I’ve often said that it would probably be easier to pick the Mac OS if you had never touched a computer before in your life. It just worked the way you’d expect it to.

In my years of using a computer these past 5 have been the best. I wish I’d gotten here sooner, but that’s ignoring a pretty substantial dark period of Mac history I took no part in. The important thing is I got here.

And, on Tuesday, I get to make another important step: I get to order my second Mac.

I’m in the middle of a pickle and won’t be able to easily post any sort of update for a while. My beloved PowerBook is showing signs of a catastrophic hard disk failure. I’m trying to get the user files off with SuperDuper! but it’s not going well. I’m getting I/O consistently.

So, despite not really having the moneys for it, it looks like I will be buying a new MacBook very soon. The ol’ PowerBook is too long in the tooth and has far too many other errors to attempt to repair. I’d march down to the Apple Store right now and pick up a new one but the rumors seem to be building that a line refresh is due on the 14th of this month. It would just kill me if I bought this week only to see an entirely new model come out the next, even with the issues that tend to accompany the first revision of an Apple line.

On top of that, the external drive I own has problems on one of its partitions. As both of our computers are somewhat old and having smallish hard disks I took the 320GB drive I bought when last the PowerBook needed to go in for repair to the Apple Store and split it three ways. Two partitions are for SuperDuper! backups of the iMac and PowerBook hard disks. The third is for storage of things that just aren’t needed all the time and take up a bunch of space: movies, roms, music, etc. Today I’ve found this partition refuses to mount and Disk Utility tells me it has an “Invalid B-Tree Node” which seems to be pretty damned bad. I just can’t justify the purchase of Disk Warrior, no matter how awesome it might be, for these files but as they represent many years worth of acquisition I can’t just leave them either.

Oh, balls!

Tinúviel is dying. I can see a tiredness in her. She no longer has the spring she once did. Her endurance is fading. Her appearance, while still alluring, is pockmarked with scars, stains, and the remnants of past injuries. She’s fading, and there’s little to be done for her.

Tinúviel, you see, is my PowerBook.

She was born sometime in 2003. October, I believe, though I do not know where I may have gleaned this information. She came into my life in December of that year. She was my first in several ways: my first notebook and my first Mac. Life was never the same after I got her.

Like most Americans of my age my experience with personal computers was primarily relegated to those running operating systems from Redmond. Our first family computer ran DOS, and I can recall joining the indignant crowd turning its collective nose up at the notion of a graphical OS like Windows 3.1. I can even remember parroting the semi-righteous indignation of Windows 3.1 being nothing more than a carbon copy of the Mac OS. Where I came by this idea is a baffling mystery. With the Internet little more than a dream on the horizon it’s difficult to know where such vitriol might have entered my consciousness.

Becoming a convert in 2003 I may have lost the credibility of a lengthy history with the Mac platform, but I endeavored to make up for it with enthusiasm. I have so vigorously promoted the platform that on numerous occasions friends and family have prefaced their inquiries with “I know you’re just going to tell me to get a Mac, but… “ before asking me to do something completely different. My typical response is to stare at the questioner quizzically, throw in a few undiscussed advantages, and then hesitantly agree with whatever decision she has already made. There’s no reasoning with some people. Still, I’d like to claim some credit in the purchase of at least four Macs: two iMacs, one MacBook, and one iBook.

But now Tinúviel is dying. She’s had a few major surgeries. She’s had her logic board replaced once, at considerable cost. Her lower RAM slot no longer functions, an issue covered by an Apple warranty extension on models purchased several months after her. She has a few scratches on the top of her case, and a rather large dent in the lower left corner¹. She’s had beer spilled on her at least twice. She played a crucial role at my wedding. Her “h” key sticks a bit nowadays.

Everything seems like a struggle to her. Her battery conks out in seemingly no time at all. The 1780 photos in my moderately sized iPhoto library cause great grief and spinning beach balls. I look at Flash videos with dread, as I know they’ll be choppy and unsatisfying². Address Book has recently simply refused to open. Most telling though: I haven’t been able to reliably make a backup for some time now. Some file, buried deep in the Library folder, seems to decide not to want to be copied every time I try and run SuperDuper!. It’s vexing and disturbing. What form of entropy is wreaking havoc on seemingly stable files?

I suppose four years is a respectable lifespan for a notebook computer. I might be able to wring a bit more out of her. I worry about the stability of her filesystem though, with all that anguish over the backup. Her replacement is looking better and better all the time. I’d considered going with the MacBook Pro, but the regular ol’ MacBooks are really all the computer I’ll need. The additional features of the MacBook Pro just don’t seem worth the expense to me. I haven’t yet spent that much time with the MacBook, but I have a feeling I’ll miss this PowerBook keyboard. It’s the most enjoyable keyboard I’ve ever used, on any machine.

I won’t be replacing her today, or tomorrow, or the next day. Someday soon though, it’s going to need to happen. I feel like I’ve been saying this for a while now. Last year I was “waiting for Leopard.” This year I considered “waiting for LED screens,” but I haven’t yet read any compelling evidence to their efficacy in the Pro or Air series so that’s starting to seem less compelling. I think in a way I’ve been looking for excuses (aside from the gorilla-in-the-room one of my bank account) in order to put off the inevitable. I honestly think I don’t want to let go.

I love this computer, warts and all.

¹ My cat — now my parent’s cat — got underfoot, tripped me, and sent the PowerBook tumbling to the brick fireplace in my parents house. Other than the dent and a scratch or two there seemed to be no lasting effects.

² YouTube seems to do just fine though. I guess the originals are just the best. And I realize this has little to do with this particular PowerBook, but I only have this one to gauge anything by.

Uggh! Take my advice: don’t try and run Mac OS X 10.4 with a puny 256 MB of RAM. That’s what the PowerBook G4s came with when I got mine and that’s what I have left at the moment. Some time back, before Tiger was released, I bumped up the RAM in my PowerBook to a fairly stately 1 GB. While I was having my logic board replaced to solve my video issues they did a RAM test and found some problems. Sure enough, when I ran Rember I saw quite a few myself. Coming as it did from Other World Computing my memory had a lifetime warranty. So, I sent it back about a week ago and ever since it’s been like fighting my way through molasses to get anything done on this computer. No fun.

By “her” I mean my PowerBook, which I call Tinúviel because she is an evenstar to her people (me) and because I am a tremendously huge dork. Here’s what happened: last Wednesday I saw that a security update had been made to OS X and proceeded to download with aplomb. Not being particularly cautious and up until now too impatient for backups I jumped right in and set to downloading. It required a reboot to fully install this update, so I let it go ahead and do that. But, it never came back up. Instead of my brilliant orange fall desktop I got an angry shaking line of about 8 to 16 pixels going horizontally across the screen.

I jumped on Staci’s iMac and browsed the knowledge base, making certain to stop by macosxhints and a few search hits for advice. I went through the usual steps. I reset the PRAM. I reset the PMU. I reset the PRAM and the PMU again. Then I realized I probably had a bigger problem on my hand and I made an appointment at my local Genius Bar.

The fellows at the Apple Store, while exceptionally nice, were not able to provide any fixes and decided I might have a hardware problem, possibly related to the logic board. But, since I could still boot it up in target disk mode for backup I decided to hold off on shipping it away. I picked up an external firewire drive and got to backing shit up.

And then, while trying use the iMac to boot off the drive I accidentally allowed Tinúviel to boot up normally and she has worked fine ever since. I don’t have any idea why and I worry that it’s only a matter of time before I lose her again but I guess I’ll just take it as a good sign and keep a current backup just in case.

Hopefully my external drive isn’t as bad as I’ve read. It’s been getting some awful user reviews. I wasn’t actually planning on buying one at a store. I went in for a firewire cable, but this was marked down pretty nicely.