My MacBook, which I acquired in 2007, is slowly dying. It started a few weeks ago with some occasional hang-ups. I thought I’d solved the problem, but it turned out that was a red-herring. The problem has gotten worse–to the point where the machine is virtually unusable. It will boot and programs will run, but it will freeze unexpectedly and frequently and once frozen, only a hard reboot will get things going again. I can’t work that way.
Last night, I did some low-level troubleshooting and discovered that the main hard disk is reporting errors. I fixed the errors using the Disk Utility and when I reran the test after a reboot, the errors were back.
And so, I am retiring that machine. I have a full backup to the cloud thanks to IDrive, but it presents me with a short-term complication:
While I can write fiction on my iPad, I still find it easier and more comfortable to write on the MacBook–especially because I can use Scrivener. So this means a few changes for a while:
- More writing on the iPad
- Borrowing Kelly’s MacBook (1 generation newer than mine) to do my writing when I’m at home and she doesn’t happen to be using it.
In the long run, I’ll need to get a new computer. But more than likely, I’ll end up getting an iMac. I no longer have a need for a MacBook since I can do everything I need to do on the iPad when I’m away from my desk. It makes me thing that for me, in my personal life, the era of the laptop may be over. I have difficulty seeing the need for a laptop in the future. Tablet devices like the iPad will continue to improve over the years so that when it is finally time to replace my iPad, I’ll replace it with a better one–one that can do even more. It’s a bit strange to think that I may never have the need of a laptop again.
My MacBook lasted four years and I used it virtually every one of those 1,461 days. It puts the cost of the laptop at about $1/day, which isn’t so bad when you look at it that way.
I have some work to do getting a profile set up on Kelly’s computer and getting some software transferred over. I’ll need to make our media drive (an external 1TB disk that was attached to my MacBook) available to her machine, and then also make sure my scanner is setup to work on her machine. Once that it all done, I should be good to go. I only managed to get in about 200 words of fiction-writing last night because of this problem. I may not get any in today while I get things configured on Kelly’s laptop.
I hope to be back to normal, as far as the daily fiction-writing goes, tomorrow.
*Yes, this is a nod to Harlan Ellison’s 1958 story “The Very Last Day of a Good Woman.”
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