Farewell, Friend...

Written by Dan Carlson • @minutiaeman@tenforward.social

Published April 16, 2005

Dan and his iBook, circa November 2003

My sister Jessica is currently studying at the University of Limerick in Ireland for the 2004-2005 academic year. Her sturdy four-year-old iBook has suddenly committed hara-kiri (or more specifically, its hard drive has), and rather than go to the expense of buying a new hard drive, shipping overseas overnight, and paying someone €75 to take apart the iBook to put the drive in, we’re sending her another computer so she can finish out the remaining month and a half of her studies with the necessary tools. (Her data is fortunately safe and backed up, she just doesn’t have any place to use it currently.)

So, me being a pushover (not to mention a kind and loving older brother — you reading this, sis? :-P) I volunteered to send her my iBook, which, while only about four months newer than hers, is still in fine working condition.

But what this means is that I’m going to be without a computer (sort of) for at least the next six weeks. (Yeah, I’m such a pushover!) I have all of my data backed up to a partition on my dad’s 160GB external hard drive, which I’m essentially borrowing to use as my computer. I’ll be plugging it into pretty much any available computer to access my files. Fortunately, I had the foresight to copy the entire boot drive, so I can actually boot any computer from the external drive and have access to all my usual stuff. It just is a lot slower to run off an external drive than an internal one. And all this isn’t helped by the fact that the only available computer right now is my dad’s five-year-old PowerBook “Pismo” (G3/400 mHz, 384 MB RAM)...

The good news in all of this, though, is that once I can scrape enough money together (hopefully within the next four weeks, but I’ve got much more pressing priorities), I’ll be able to get myself a nice, shiny, brand-spanking-new 12” PowerBook G4! (I just need to keep telling myself to not put it on a credit card!)

So, farewell, my old iBook friend! You’ve been my trusty companion for more than three years, always taking my demands without a fuss, never complaining, and faithfully chugging along no matter how much a load I piled on. And though I’m not sorry for the opportunity to get a new computer that’ll be at least three times as fast, I’ll still miss you!

(Okay, that’s enough of the personification of a machine!)