It was one week ago today, at approximately the same time. My powerbook was sleeping, and I was climbing into bed. I set the laptop in it’s rightful place, on my lap, opened it up, poised my fingers to type in my password…and it turned off.

At this point, I thought to myself “Well, maybe the battery was dead, and it was in reserve power while sleeping.” That’s not an unreasonable assumption, it’s happened to me before, so I plugged in the laptop, and read an article in my new issue of Linux Journal. About fifteen minutes later, I hit the power button the powerbook, and it booted right up. “Ok,” I thought to myself, “no problem here at all.”

I open up Firefox, start browsing…and out of nowhere, the system locks up, and I get a Kernel Panic. At least the OS X Kernel Panic is pretty.

So, I did what the message said to do…I held down the power button for several seconds until the system turned off. And it hasn’t booted since.

I tried everything that I could find in terms of support for the issue. I tried to do a Hardware check, but it wouldn’t boot from a CD. In fact, it wouldn’t boot at all; the furthest it would get is to Open Firmware. I can’t tell you how many times I tried reset-nvram, hoping it would do something. It never did.

So, on Saturday morning, I took the Powerbook back to the Apple Store at the King of Prussia Mall. The employee working the Genius Bar looked at it for about a minute, and then flatly said “Ok, fill this out, it’s going back.” It’s been gone since.

I only bought it back in August, but I’ve already become so utterly dependent on it that it’s rather amusing; I’m exhibiting classic signs of withdrawl. Prior to purchasing it, I was afraid I would never use it; now, my powerbok is all I ever want to use, and without it, I feel useless.

I can’t run Photoshop on Linux, so right now I just can’t run Photoshop, period. I can’t update any songs on my iPod. I honestly do miss it, as cliche and pathetic as that is. Oh well, it will be back soon, and since it’s under warranty, the repairs are completely free. I suppose I had just expected more from a top-of-the-line Apple notebook. All I know right now is that they have to replace a part, but I don’t know which part, so it could be anything.

Maybe I’ll throw a party when I get it back.