The Five Stages of Computer Grief

This past weekend I had intended on kicking off a whole new round of blog articles but technologically some one had other plans. My trusty old iBook G4 has apparently gotten another case of dead hard drive and I don’t think it is going to be able to get over it again.

Here is what I’ve been going through.

1: Denial
No it can’t be dead. It is only a couple months since I had the freaking hard drive replaced and major work done. I just have to zap the Pram some more and see if I can boot it from the hardware test disk. I am sure that it is just going to pop right back up and work great and give me a couple more years of good times.

2: Anger
Damn Apple.. damn me.. damn this computer! Damn this shirt, I bet it was the cats.. All those times I caught them standing on my laptop. Arr this is not fair.

3: Bargaining
Come on please just one more boot up and I’ll back up all your data and totally treat your right. I’ll even get you Mac OSX 10.5! I’ll never take you out of the house or fall asleep using you in bed ever again? I swear that I will never use you to surf for internet p0rn ever again!

4: Depression
Oh God! I never have another computer like this again. This was the computer that made me love the Mac again. I am going to die alone, unloved without the loving touch of a Macintosh.

5: Acceptance
Well I guess a few weeks of living off my thumb drive and old windows PC are not going to kill me. I use that computer pretty damn hard for the past four years and it was going to go sometime or rather. You never get to schedule these things.

Well I need to go through my web mail client and put together a list of all the contacts that I can and back it up to some external source. There is only one or two emails that I really wanted and I did have a lot of stuff backed up to my external hard drives so I am not going to loose all my pictures and music. It is not the first time that I’ve suffered catastrophic data loss and I’ll get through this.

I should save up and in two or three weeks I’ll have enough to get a Mac Mini with a monitor or an iMac. They have the cool Intel based ones and I can use all the software and hardware that I got for my iBook. Heck I could even run Windows in Bootcamp.

I am debating either getting a pimped out Mac Mini with a big hard drive and a bunch of ram and a widescreen Dell or ViewSonic monitor or getting a 20 inch iMac

I want to stick with Mac OSX as my main OS. My girlfriend is fine with her Asus Eee laptop but I need something with a little more punch to it. I was thinking about getting a desktop machine again and only use my Windows XP eMachines laptop when I need to do any traveling which is seldom.

Financially now would be as good as ever to get a new computer. I just hope that they don’t go and introduce a new MacMini right after I order my new one.

Ironically my Xbox 360 is doing great and has given me no problems!

I am going to get though this. Each ending is a new beginning right?

Update: It ends up that I had more contact information that I was going to miss in my webmail client. I also had my VoodooPad databases on my iPods so I while it does suck I am going to totally survive not getting on to my old iBook again.

Right now my biggest choice is between getting a 24 inch widescreen monitor and a Mac Mini or saving up for an iMac. I like the idea of having a separate monitor and desktop but the iMacs do have a bit more power but compared to what I’ve been using for the past years any of the Mac Minis would seem like one hell of an upgrade for me.