When I got up the next morning and pushed the button, _“Hhhmmmmmmm”. I got the chime. It booted up like usual and everything was working fine. I chalked it up as somethat Onyx had done and left it at that. Until…

Today when I got off work, I was using the ‘puter while conducting some (eh hem) “business.” When the time came in which I needed 2 hands, I closed the lid and “SNAP!” The left hinge broke. Crap. Oh well, as long as I can close the lid, it will still work. Still, I was concerned about the hinge so I turned the Mac off and went out to the garage to get some small screwdrivers so I could investigate, “maybe it could be fixed” I thought. Turns out, no. It’s completely busted. In fact, whilst futzing with it, a small piece fell off. Sigh. Oh well, lets put it back together.

I put the screws back in and tried to force the screen to somewhat go back the way it should be. I hit the power button and guess what? That’s right. NOTHING! I did the three finger salute about a dozen times and turned it completely off about the same number of times, but still, nothing. Now I’m thinking, “Great. Just what I needed; to spend money on a new ‘puter.”

I let is set for a while then tried several more times. This time, I was getting the chime, but it still wasn’t actually booting. Every so often, it would start to chime, then short out and/or the chime would get really loud and distored. That can’t be good. Eventually, the damn thing booted (obviously, since I’m writing this post).

Even though it appears to working fine, I’m still concerned that my Mac is limping along like a senior citizen with a walker. So, ever since the first time it acted up, I started thinking about a replacement and I’m really torn at this point. I work all day on a Wintel desktop (not by choice) and I feel more productive on a desktop. At the same time, I can’t really afford a new G5 desktop (since I’d have to buy a monitor as well). I could get a new iMac, but even then, it’s going to run me closer to $2k. I just can’t spend that much.

So, that only leaves me with one other option. Get a Wintel machine. Not the ideal replacement, but cheap. I see Dell’s with reasonable specs for around $800 with a 17” LCD monitor. So, certainly, for less than $1k, I can pick up a relatively nice desktop and LCD monitor.

I hate to NOT buy an Apple, but I just can’t justify it anymore. Most of the work I’m doing these days is web development. The days of design went bye-bye when I started at Autobytel so Photoshop work is minimal. Besides that, with the new browsers and CSS, I find myself using less images in my layouts. And, lets face it, a text editor is a text editor. I can use just about any text editor to get my work done. I’ve tried just about all of them (Vim , BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, Smultron, jEdit, HTML-Kit, ZDE, Coldfusion Studio and a handful others)…. what to do. How about a pros and cons list… ok.

CONS (Buying an x86 machine)

+ All my drives are formatted as HFS+ so I’d have to figure that one out
+ All my photos are in iPhoto and the directory structure is not favorable
+ If I don’t use Windows (e.g. Linux) I can’t use iTunes
+ It’s not a Mac
+ I’d have a barcode stamped on my forehead that would distinguish me from the rest of the windows zombies.

PROS

+ I don’t have to run Windows
+ Apple is soon to release Mac OS X for x86 since they’re going to start using Intel chips
+ Someone has already got OS X (Tiger) running on x86
+ I don’t have to run Windows
+ Hardware is cheap

I don’t know what to do. It wouldn’t be too terribly hard to get all my data over to a new filesystem (especially with Linux since they actually have HFS support, at least, they used to). At this point, the toughest part would be convincing my wife that I need another computer :)