Tethered!

A year and a half after partially passing a four-foot drop test, my PowerBook has finally given up the ghost. The hard drive is failing, and the system won't boot. So now I'm chained to my desktop.

The good news is that I was able to fire it up in Target Disk Mode and copy most of the contents to my desktop machine. The bad news is that unless I get ambitious and install the hard drive out of my daughter's old iBook (whose display failed a similar drop test some time ago), the PowerBook is kaput.

Getting a new MacBook or MacBook Pro is not an entirely unpleasant prospect, and even without this new impetus, could have been justified by my career situation - I'm probably about to enter the ranks of itinerant IT workers, and may have need of a machine that can boot the Operating System From Hell - but I hadn't planned on making that investment just yet. But what's a guy to do? Have you seen the smartphone commercial where the guy is "lost without it"? That's what I feel like without my wireless laptop.