The dead power supply fan and the eight-year-old Macintosh

The fan on my desktop computer’s power supply failed.  Given how long I’ve been catching a fleeting whiff of something hot and electrical, it was probably at least two days ago.  This morning I noticed the quiet.  Hmmm.   Sheesh, it is kind of hot.  Hmmm again.  I ran a backup and prepared to open the case.

I don’t like going into my computer.  I’ll do it—I’ve replaced hard drives, added RAM, and stuff like that—but on balance, I’d rather have a cavity filled.  This day, it didn’t take long to see that the power supply fan was doing absolutely nothing.  Fortunately, the power supply is painless to remove, and the fan is painless to remove from it.

All right!  Got the dead soldier in my hand.  Replace it, reverse the disassembly, done.  GigaParts, my first merchant choice, is closed on Sunday, but this ought to be a pretty common item, so no problems anticipated.  Confirmed as much with Carey on the way out.

0 for 4.

Oh, Radio Shack, Best Buy, Circuit City, and Staples all had fans.  But they were all either 80mm or 120mm.  My fan is 92mm.

I figure this is my punishment for dancing on CompUSA’s grave on Usenet several months ago.

So I came home empty-handed.  As I’m into tomorrow anyway, I figured I’d check the GigaParts web site, and guess what?  It’s not out there either.  So I found it at some parts house in Michigan, and it’ll be here Wednesday or Thursday.  $10.76 delivered.

So what to do in the meantime?  Well, there’s my laptop.  But you know, sitting over there in the corner is a Macintosh G4 Cube, demoted from Dad’s office several years ago.  Hmmm.

He asked me if I wanted it, and I said “sure; I don’t know what I’ll do with it, but I’ll play around with it.”  Definitely cool-looking anyway, you know?  I put it on the network and largely forgot about it, though I did stick a KVM switch on it.  It came in handy when I was ripping my CD library, because there were a dozen or so titles that my Windows box just wouldn’t see.  The CD drive in the Mac did fine with them.

But mostly, it’s sat idle until tonight, when I decided to write this post on it.  I was going to make it a full-on adventure until my fan arrived and try to use the Mac exclusively.  But that’s not going to work out, mainly because it’ll be too painful to put together a decent image manipulation workflow without hours of tedious research and/or money spent, both ultimately of dubious benefit.  So I’ll be laptopping it some.

Plus, it’s a fine servant, but definitely an old one.  Some rather routine tasks are formidable challenges for it.

I’ve written fondly of Apple’s role in my childhood and formative years, but I rather doubt I’m going to be a Mac guy in 2008.  I’ve used Windows steadily for 15 years now, and whether better or worse, it’s familiar.  Plus, it’s unlikely it’ll ever be anything but Windows in a professional environment for me, so why invite the chaos?

For one moment this evening, though, and maybe for a couple more this week, I am a Macintosh user.

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