Lack of portability of laptop

For those of you who have heard about the battery recall of powerbooks, I’m sure you’ve all been wondering whether my powerbook has been affected. And the answer is yes. So the good news is that Apple is going to send me a new battery. In fact, it’s apparently maybe already on its way. The bad news is that I shouldn’t use my old battery in the meantime. Which means that for the moment I can only use my laptop when it is hooked up to an A/C power supply. Now only can I not use my computer without it being hooked up to an A/C outlet, I have to shut it down every time I disconnect it. Which means turning it off whenever I go to and from work. And while that’s not a huge hassle, it is very annoying. It also seems to reset the clock because there’s no battery in there to keep anything stored in ram or anything, apparently.

All in all it’s just a very frustrating experience. I mean, there isn’t anything actually preventing me from using my current battery, but the fact that they’ve actually issued a recall on them means that if I were to use it and something were to go wrong with my computer, there would obviously be no warranty coverage for it at all. So that’s not really any good. And I’m also somewhat wary of using something that was considered sufficiently bad that they needed to recall it.

I really hope that the battery gets here faster than expected… But I don’t really believe that will happen. The really annoying part isn’t so much when using it around the house but rather when I’m at work and want to take it with me to a meeting. That’s where the having to shut it down when I unplug it is really annoying. Or if I want to take it to Jim’s office in order to show him some plots, or just show Deb something with my code or something. That’s the really annoying part. I feel like it’s sort of killed the laptop part of my laptop, essentially. And that is just extremely frustrating. But it’s not at all worth buying a new battery, of course, since I don’t think I’ll ever need two batteries for this thing. All in all, it’s left me kind of grumbly.