"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Funny How Things Work Out

My last trip convinced me that I can no longer rely on my clamshell (older Mac laptop) for surfing purposes. It runs OS9 and therefore can only support ancient browsers that cannot visit all sites and displays wonkily most of the sites it does bring up.

I flirted with the idea of upgrading to a much more recent MacBook, but I couldn't figure out how I could justify spending that kind of money when all I wanted was to be able to surf while traveling. The clamshell is otherwise better suited for this purpose--it is very robust and was cheap enough that I wouldn't be heartbroken if it is stolen. No, what I needed was to upgrade my OS so I could run a more recent browser.

After much googling, I came to the conclusion that while a Clamshell is too slow to run OSX for a lot of applications, it's fine for surfing. The catch was how to get OSX on my clamshell. I didn't have the knowhow or the tools.

Today, I went to a Mac user group set up for my city and asked if anyone could upgrade my OS for me. At the same time, I replied to a poster who was looking for someone with a working clamshell to run some tests on his own iBook. Turns out that he knows how to install OSX on a clamshell (did it on his own, so that's a good enough reference for me), so in exchange for being able to run his charging/battery tests with my battery, he'll install OSX on my clamshell at no charge!

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