Under the Wire: This old hunker

I need a new laptop. That’s what everyone keeps telling me. Everyone who’s seen my current laptop, anyway.

My current laptop is an Apple PowerBook G4/667. A titanium one. It’s a bit of a rarity, actually, because it has a 166MHz bus, but the optical drive is read-only DVD-ROM.

I bought it back in November 2001, the very day Apple announced the upgraded bus speeds, and two weeks later (mere days after it was delivered) the company announced the same model with a CD-burning Combo drive.

I don’t know anyone else whose computer (desktop or laptop) can’t burn a CD at the very least or, ideally, a DVD. I could be wrong on this, but I think it’s pretty near impossible to buy a non-writeable optical drive nowadays.

That’s not the reason people reckon I need a new laptop though. I travel a lot, so my laptop is frequently sliding in and out of a backpack. It’s well protected in transit, but going in and out of the pack has rubbed the finish off all four corners, leaving bare metal exposed.

The hinges have also been slightly deformed, which means that every time I turn it on in a new location the screen goes strange – an Andy Warhol experience of inverted colours and random lines, or a sunset-orange melting effect that horrifies the uninitiated. I find that grabbing the sides of the display and giving it a twist -- first one way, then the other -- gets things back on track.

When I moved into my new house, a friend of mine asked me to send him a picture of the view from my home office (I can see Brays Bay if I stand up). I went to pull up the old wooden venetian blind, and with a sickening creak-crash it plummeted off the window frame and landed squarely on my desk. I hadn’t tried that when inspecting the place.

My scanner was destroyed and my desk lamp became an artistic statement. My laptop suffered a deep dent over the left-hand speaker, and a crack in the frame adjacent. A couple of centimetres up and the screen would have been destroyed.

Instead, the only real effect has been a buzzing sound on the left when I watch DVDs or listen to music. I can overcome it to an extent by putting my finger over the crack in the frame, although this is a bit uncomfortable because of the mild electrical shocks.

Just before the venetian incident the battery stopped taking a charge. It will charge up, or at least tell me it is doing so, but if I run the machine away from mains power I get about 20 minutes before it puts itself to sleep "to protect the contents of memory". Less if I’m actually doing anything. This isn’t a big deal -- I got three years out of the battery, which is about what the manufacturer claims.

It’s a little frustrating that I can’t simply buy a new battery from a shop. I have to order one as a service part. I’ll get around to that one day.

Meanwhile I’ve just come back from a holiday, during which I was, as one does, sitting reading websites with the laptop balanced on the arm of a sofa. A moment’s distraction saw the laptop plunge from the sofa, landing first on a metal bin and then on the ground, lid first. It sustained a nasty scratch next to the maker’s logo, and one of the hinges isn’t quite right at all -- the lid won’t fully close -- but the machine still works.

It’s like watching a Bruce Willis movie, in which our hero gets increasingly beaten and bloodied as the action wears on, and by the end we’re amazed he can even walk, let alone maintain his good humour. I will get a new laptop one day. When this one’s ready to move on.