PowerBook v MacBook – Old school rules!

The last couple of weeks have been held together by a lone EEE PC 701 4G, little trooper that it is. It all started just after the beginning of January when I picked up that the Apple NZ store had started stocking new Aluminium MacBooks on the refurb part of their site. Now i picked up my Powerbook in October 2004 on the USA refurb site, and that came with a year’s guarantee and had stood me in good stead. Fine, I thought, I’m due an upgrade and duly ordered the MacBook.

I was looking forward to it’s arrival and playing with Leopard too – I had the Tiger OSX on my PowerBook G4 12″. Unfortunately, the lack of firewire on the MacBook was a bit of a bigger stumbling block than I had anticipated. My dismay grew as I trawled the forums and found out about the many pitfalls of trying to transfer data and apps from a PPC G4 Mac running Tiger to an Intel Mac running Leopard. It really shouldn’t be that hard should it?

Two hours on the phone to a very nice AppleCare support person later, and the data capture program she asked me to run on both machines crashed on the new MacBook. Two days later and I hadn’t received any follow-up call from Apple despite sending emails requesting this – and they had agreed to do it. So, I returned the MacBook.

BUT – in my attempt to get these two Macs to talk to each other, I upgraded the PowerBook G4 to Leopard, only to be confronted with the Apple equivalent of the blue screen of death. The ‘little Eee PC that could’kept  me sane at this point, as my workplace was now at this time completely paralysed with the Conficker worm. So, armed with iPhone and Eee PC, I repatriated the MacBook and got the PowerBook booked into the excellent services of Toucan Computers in Wellington. One battery and a new hard drive later, the PowerBook is back in fine fettle and whizzing along compared to it’s former laconic self. I think the old 80GB hard drive and data structure must have been in a bad way. The new 250GB drive should work wonders.

The Eee PC has done me proud, but it’s nice to be back to OSX for a while, and the 12″ screen feels positively spacious. For now, I’m embracing low-cost computing and upgrading – very much in line with the zeitgeist.