Christmas Loot

Yesterday went pretty well... Heidi was happy with her presents, especially with the black MacBook. I'd mostly given her things she'd asked for, but clearly I've been listening better than she expected as she didn't guess most of it. The one thing she hadn't asked for, a full-length memory-foam body pillow, has been approved - she slept very well all night, and the kitten happily cuddled against it.

Ella got the biggest haul of her life. She got cat toys from four different people. All of them make a lot of noise, are fun to knock about, and especially fun to knock down the stairs from the living room into our bedroom. I foresee a lot of noisy wake-up calls in the next few days, until all of them are underneath a piece of furniture where her long paws cannot reach. The one mis-gift was from Heidi's mom: a six foot long collapsible tunnel with cat toys inside and some holes on the sides to peek out of. Ella likes it but there's no way to fit it in a Manhattan apartment.

Heidi got me some things from my list (CDs, textbooks on Hittite history) and a lot of things that I should have thought to ask for but didn't - converse baseball shoes and a bunch of clothes from the Gap. One of these days, I will look less dressed up and dorky!

What to do with a slightly broken PowerBook?

When I purchased Heidi's new MacBook, I intended to do a shuffle: her 15" Aluminum PowerBook would go to me, and my old Titanium PowerBook (the 450 Mhz model) would go to whoever wanted it.

However, in the last few weeks, Heidi's aluminum PowerBook has developed a bunch of flaws: the old battery now has 20 minutes of life between charges, the latch doesn't quite close the machine, and worst of all the harddisk has a few bad sectors - the system hangs for 2 seconds several times a minute.

The question is, what do I do with it? Getting it repaired will probably cost about three to four hundred dollars, which is about the same that a 3-year-old PowerBook in good condition costs on eBay. Replacing the harddisk myself would take about an hour (in the best case) and would most likely leave the machine dead - I can handle big servers just fine, but laptops are another story. Somebody in the local Mac Users Group has repaired laptops before and would be willing to replace the harddisk for a bottle of wine, but that still leaves the latch (an expensive repair) and the battery.

What to do, what to do... I hate to toss a mostly functional laptop.

I can live without the upgrade - if and when the rumored 12 inch tablet Mac comes out, I'll buy that for Heidi and we'll do the shuffle then (that'd give me a MacBook - awesome). For web browsing and ssh, the old Titanium PowerBook will do just fine, and it has 4 hours battery life between charges.

But again, I hate to toss an almost-good laptop. I'd feel bad about eBaying a broken computer and selling it for parts isn't really worth the time and trouble. Any advice? If you know somebody who's good at Mac laptop repairs and has access to replacement parts, I'm sure we can work something out...