Flash is poorly. Yesterday I picked him* up to write an email and found that the screensaver had frozen** and the machine wouldn't respond to any input. I forced a restart and within a few seconds was back up and running, then a few minutes later he froze up again, screen still fixedly displaying the open desktop but nothing responding. Another forced restart and the same result so I shut him down and left him be for 24hrs in the vain hope he might sleep it off.
Today he made it as far as the login window before locking up, when I made a second attempt at starting him he just sat with a blank screen angrily whirring fans at me. I think that means he needs to go to the doctor's and since I didn't get AppleCare that's likely to be expensive. Bugger.
Happily I am really bad at getting round to things. For the last month or so one of the two bargain PowerBooks I bought on eBay - when Iain commissioned me to find him a new laptop for going back to Japan with - has been sitting waiting for me to get off my arse and put it back up for sale. Iain went with the newer of the two - a mid 2004 Aluminium PowerBook G4 (spruced up by yours truly and christened Rerun). The other machine was a late 2002 Titanium G4 which had no battery and which I've called Ariel (after giving her Sparky's old NewerTek high cappacity battery which I removed before sending him to the insurance company 3 years ago and have had kicking around ever since meaning to put on eBay... like I said, bad at getting round to things)
Anyway I was going to sell Ariel back on eBay after doing a little work on her with some other spare parts I had kicking about, including (if I could coax it into working) Iain's discarded PC wireless adaptor... but I've been kinda busy and poor old Ariel has just been sitting in a corner doing nothing but occasionally charging and discharging her transplant battery (which seems in good order if a little eccentric after spending 3 years in a cupboard)
When I was forced to admit that Flash is not well, I decided to dust the old girl off and set to trying to make her talk to the Belkin wireless card, and after a bit of scrabbling about forums and support pages, (and an inexplicable 15min where the card was installed, apparently working but not connecting to the router) I have a usable stand-in for my poorly laptop (and a much more saleable prospect when Flash is all fixed)
Fingers crossed it's nothing too serious.
*Yes "he" I'm an anthropomorphist when it comes to computers and cars. In the unlikely event that that's news to you, you'll just have to deal with it
**on a picture of Ben Browder. I'm not blaming him