strange powerbook noises
I’m a little worried about knave. When he’s sitting on a flat surface (the desk, the floor, my lap) everything is fine. When I rotate it so the base is not parallel with the floor, it makes a noise. I mentioned this before, but now I know what the noise reminds me of: the sound that hair clippers make when they get jammed. It’s also interesting that this noise only occurs while I’m turning the machine. If I hold it at a 45 degree angle with the floor, and keep it still, it’s quiet, but if I constantly turn it side to side, the noise persists.
I hope nothing bad happens. I didn’t opt to buy the extended AppleCare, which so far has not been a bad thing. I got knave in 2003-07, just in time for OSCON. My original plan was for a two year lifecycle, but lately I’ve been thinking that it should last three.
It looks like the current direct replacement would run me about $1900; the only upgrade I’d feel like I’d need would be the 512 stick of RAM, which would bring me to 768, 128 more than I have in this machine. I could get a 1G stick, for a gig and a quarter total, which would bring the total price to $2300, well over the price of knave. It would be about 500MHz faster and have twice the storage and twice the VRAM (who cares?). Actually, it looks like I could pick it up with the stock RAM and buy a 1G stick from Crucial for $500, bringing my total to about $2100, a bit over knave’s price.
I’d like to see some keen new PowerBook stuff happen, but I’m not holding my breath. Price drops would be nice, speed boosts without price hikes would be nice, and a dual core G4 would be great. Still, the best thing of all would be for this laptop to last until those happens, and then longer.