This evening my stalwart Powerbook (Pismo 400MHz) died. (What is with these rash strings of hardware failures I’m having as of late?)

This one could have been prevented. It was my fault – I should have not precariously positioned the power cord of the Pismo near the entrance door of my office.

Silly me.

I was upgrading the OS on the Pismo from 10.4.9 to 10.4.11 and a quarter of the way through, Aarti came into my office, and accidentally tripped over the cable, knocking the laptop from the table to the floor. The hard drive never came back up after that. Surprisingly, the machine boots and the display is fine. There was no damage on the case of the unit itself, a remarkable testament to the Pismo’s durability. (It landed on the carpet from a nearly 3 feet drop!)

A new hard drive may bring this machine back from the dead, but at this point, it’s not financially viable for me to explore that option. So, it really is the end of the road for this laptop. Going out with a “thud”, so to speak.

R.I.P. Pismo.

-Krishna