Always make the hard decision the first time around.
I have been oogling Macs for a few years now - especially after doing print layouts on a new 24" desktop at the Cord - and sold my old Acer laptop a bit prematurely to speed the transition from clumsy Windows to Mac. But my Craigslist find was a poor replacement.
I bought this iBook G4 from an American teacher in a Quizno's in Itaewon. I know - far too sketchy to trust already, right? But he'd kept it in very good shape, had already reloaded the OS and removed all his old photos, had it up and running for us to try before we bought it and threw in his laptop case with the deal. 500,000 won later, I was the proud owner of a used Mac.
Things were running smoothly for the first few weeks. The 1GB upgrade had helped its performance, but it was still a bit clunky when running a few apps at once - iTunes (Music), Safari (Internet), Transmission (a program to download music, video and programs), and a few Microsoft Office programs at once. I chalked it up to high expectations and babied it through a few restarts to get it running smoothly again.
But one day, it didn't start up again. It would start up, show a grey screen, then an Apple icon, then a little rotating dial (Apple's version of the hourglass) ... and would show this same screen until I restarted it manually or let the battery run out of juice.
After trying to call the young guy who had sold it to us (let's call him Rod), we realized that Rod was ignoring our calls. He also ignored our emails, which politely asked him to give us a call and gave him (almost) no indication that we were running into a real problem. Thanks, Rod. We appreciate your honesty.
I wanted to salvage the 3-year-old laptop, Jon wanted me to get a new one. So we took it to the 'a# store', an Apple reseller, to show one of their techs the problem for a quick 'Is it worth it or is it not?' question.
It was not. So I walked out of the store with this:
It's a dated model - the aluminum body Macs were released less than a month ago - in the now overly copied white colour, but I've finally got the new operating system, Leopard, and can get the latest updates and programs - including MS Office 2008 that I successfully pirated! - and will not get bogged down with Windows update upon update. The keys have both English and Hangeul (Korean) letters but the programs are in English, and power supply cable is Korean/European but can be easily changed for when I return home and need a 3-prong 110v power adapter instead of a Korean/European 2-prong 220v one. Needless to say, I'm one happy camper!
Its one downside: I didn't buy it from mom and dad. I'm sorry!
As a sidenote ... We had our first snowfall today. It lasted for about two minutes here in the city, then turned to rain. Some students were thrilled and ran to the window to watch the giant spongy flakes on the pedestrians below, remarking how romantic it is to experience the first snowfall of the year. I take the snow as a good sign: after two or three days of suddenly bitter cold, daytime temperatures down to -8 after weeks of fall weather, it looks like its warming up a bit and I won't have to buy long-johns to wear under my pants for a while yet.
Icicles form on vegetation in Gyeonggi Province during the weekend.
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