In a few weeks my laptop will be 4.5 years old. And for all intents and purposes it still holds its own pretty well for practically everything, but the most CPU-intensive tasks. Tasks that I typically perform on much faster desktop machines anyway.

Some weeks ago the laptop, a 2003 17″ Apple Powerbook G4, started exhibiting pretty weird symptoms: the laptop would intermittently ‘lose’ the AC adaptor, or it would stop charging. This would happen at different times, without any movement of the device or the power brick. There were times I left the laptop on all night on battery power and connected to the AC adaptor, only to find the battery completely drained and the laptop in a weird power state — not completely off, not sleeping, but certainly not charging either.

I was initially very perplexed by this behaviour and was ready to write the laptop off — it is ageing and I have been meaning to replace it for a long time, although I never quite found a good reason for doing so until now.
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