ddubb industries

Is my trusty Powerbook G4 getting long in the tooth?

May 12th, 2008 technical

My experience thus far with the Apple 12″ Powerbook G4 1.5MHz:

1. June 2005 - May 2008 - Three years without quirks, lockups, reformats, reinstalls, defrags. My computer just works and I use it at least 5 hours a day, that’s 5475 operating hours, 30 trillion clock cycles of happy computing. Maybe I locked it up once but I had like 40 apps running.
2. April 20, 2008 - I notice things to seem a bit sluggish. I’m using about 78GB of my 80GB drive and can’t decide what should go. Moving archives off to the backup drive guarantees that I will need to use them (some kind of Murphy’s Law). Too many photos and unneeded video footage. My new camera with an 8GB card only makes the onslaught worse. Lack of free space is obviously affecting the swap file breathing room and hurting performance.
3. May 1, 2008 - My cheapo mouse was becoming inoperable on most surfaces and froze on the screen. I wiggled it to get it to move and within a few seconds I got the above message for the first time ever. This must be the mac equivalent of a blue screen of death. It’s such a foreign experience to me that I was quite scared by it.
4. May 10, 2008 - I was doing basic web dev stuff, javascript was getting some errors and the fan kicked on high gear (I don’t understand why it’s such a processor hog). Then everything starts working extremely slow. Activity monitor says there’s a kernel_task using 99.5% of the processor. It seems to be melting but I’m able to use the .5% and a lot of patience to get the machine to shut itself down. It starts back up fresh and spry.
5. May 12, 2008 - iMovie is crashing for no good reason.

I have no need for a MacIntel, though sometimes I’m curious what I’m missing with Leopard. I’m perfectly content with using this machine for the rest of my life. I pray this is just a midlife crisis.