It was only after I started using Microsoft Virtual PC 6 extensively for PowerPoint, Outlook, and a few in-house corporate applications that I began to lust after another machine - like one of the new (at that time) PowerBook G4 15” 1.5GHz machines, that ran VPC like the wind. So I twisted the hell out my my wife’s arm, and she ended up surprising me with “if you’re going to buy a 15-inch, you might as well get a 17-inch, because you’ll end up jonesing for one in a few months anyway.”

So long story short, I ended up buying a PowerBook G4 17”. Oh, that gigantic, glorious, desktop-sized display! The power of the 1.5GHz PowerPC chip! But it was gigantic, a lunch tray, an aluminum wing for a small aircraft, a weapon. It didn’t fit on my lap, or the airplane seat-back tray, or damn near anywhere else for that matter. And then work picked up, and I needed the power of a real PC instead of an emulated one through VPC.

So off the PB17 went to some random guy on craigslist for a wad of $100 bills. It was pretty funny - he was a little guy, probably 5’2” at best - and he brought this big friend of his (like 6’4” and 260

pounds big) along to keep an eye on the transaction and make sure he didn’t get ripped off or otherwise taken advantage of.

And I ended up back on my corporate Dell, downloading Trillian and Mozilla and Thunderbird and 3M Digital Post-It Notes, desperately trying to get back some of that OSX mojo, but never quite getting comfortable with my computer. Fortunately, all my whining around the office perked up the ears of Alex Kass, I guy I worked with at the time, who was kind enough to give me an old PowerBook G3 ‘Lombard’ he had sitting around in a closet.

I ended up putting a couple hundred bucks into that machine, breathing new life into it with a 60GB hard drive, a new battery, a WiFi card, and a FireWire card, and it actually became pretty usable. During a business trip to Tokyo, I bought a Japanese Lombard keyboard, and pulled a lot of the keycaps over onto the US English keyboard for kind of a nice change from the usual.

But as nice as the Lombard was, I found myself wishing for a machine with Bluetooth, a built-in WiFi card, and a faster processor. So, I went back to

trolling craigslist for the same type of machine that I sold many moons ago: a PowerBook G4 12” 867Mhz. And not long after, I found one.

I split the driving difference with the seller, meeting him 45 miles from my house at a random Starbucks on the peninsula. I ordered a Tall Low-Fat Mocha, he didn’t order anything at all. And there it was, everything I had imagined it to be, and more - he tossed in an iSight camera and a nice bag to sweeten the deal. I drove straight home, pulled the 60GB drive from the Lombard and put it into the newly acquired PB12, and never looked back. I was back with my true love.

And by the way, if you decide to crack open the case of a PowerBook 12 yourself to swap hard drives, make sure you’re really really careful with the socket where the lead from the power switch plugs into the motherboard. It’s real easy to snap it off the motherboard, and nearly impossible to repair.  Trust me, I know from firsthand experience.