Victorianitas

Other Mac users will probably be able to pin down the general degree of idiocy that lay behind my actions if I explain that they involved the following:

1) the words "that would've worked in system 9, and I'm sure it can't be that different"
2) the System folder.

Yes. Oops. I now have a very pretty paperweight.

All right, I'm exaggerating a little bit: it's not dead. It's just rather ill. And while my Mac-fixing knowledge does extend to saying things like "okay, it's still recognising its FireWire ports, so we'll boot it in target disk mode from your laptop and run Disk Utility from the install CDs" as two of us flap and fidget around the desk, I'm not confident enough of my data-preserving abilities to mess around with it any more just now. I've already checked that everything on the hard drive is intact and accessible if linked up to another computer; when I have a laptop with enough space to back things up, I'll get braver with the fixes.

And did you notice how subtly I dropped in that 'when' there? After the semi-colon and everything? See how casually I treat the matter of getting a new computer, for lo, I am a professional, and it is but a tool with which I craft my art (which let's just hypothetically pretend is academic writing rather than fin-de-this-siecle computer games). If I have found a way to afford a new computer, due to yet another part-time job and a judicious loan from my parents, this is no matter for shrieking with joy. Why, going to the Apple store to pick up my new laptop will be a veritable inconvience.

Or not.

I'm not, I should establish, getting a new computer because I broke the old one. The old one is saveable, I'm fairly sure. But it's, well... getting sort of old now. The power cuts out for no reason sometimes, and the hard drive occasionally won't spin on startup (meaning a blank grey screen and some panicky-sounding beeps), and the light is fading to the point where video is getting close to unwatcheable, although I didn't notice this for ages because the only video files I was watching on it were Battlestar Galactica episodes and I just thought, well, it's supposed to be dark and bleak-looking, right? (Not quite that dark and bleak-looking, it turns out.) And it's slow because it's seven years old, and getting slower every day as the hard drive ages. And it won't run Sims 2, which I'm sure you'll agree with me is the main thing. Etc.

Also, I am a weak consumerist sheep who cannot be held responsible for her actions when Apple say things like 'educational discount' and 'comes with OSX 10.5: Leopard installed'. (Although I am wondering whether Apple are going to start running out of cat names for their OS upgrades before they move on to System 11. "Now introducing OSX 10.8: Ocelot!")

I've never owned a laptop before (okay, Apple, 'notebook', whatever); I've never owned a computer with wireless capabilities. I've never even owned a computer that'll let me play YouTube videos properly. And, yeah, there'll come a day when the new computer is also shamefully outdated and won't be able run anything produced in the past three years and will get moved to the 'Older Macs...' section of Apple's support website, and I'll be right back here, but, eh. I'm sure we'll all be living on the moon and using teleporters by then.