The guy at the Genius bar said, "I have to tell you, I'm standing here in complete shock that your computer is still working." Er, great. ?

4.5 year old iBook, but it works like a top. Some applications are kind of slow, but it's manageable. I know if I need to use iPhoto, I'll open the application and then go do the dishes and hopefully by the time I'm done it will be open. He also laughed at the fact that the computer was only equipped with 256 mb ram. I didn't feel like he was making fun of me--it was more like looking at an old Commodore 64 and remembering how cool they seemed way back then.

Anyway, I'd spent an hour on the phone yesterday with Netgear trying to reconfigure the permissions on the router to break down the firewall. That was after spending a week doing email exchanges with tech support in India (I hate being on the phone and would rather have a solution take a week than an hour if I can avoid getting on the phone.) However, it took a week for the Indian tech support to realize that me saying, "I have a Mac, an iBook G4" to mean MAC computer. Doesn't run Windows. Windows solutions don't work on a Mac. Ohhhh. Netgear was absolutely stymied as to what was wrong with my machine. We reset and reconfigured the router at least twice on the phone (and this is after 3 attempts on my own before this whole rigamarole).

The problem? I haven't repaired the permissions under disk utilities in 4.5 years. This was what floored the Mac guy. No way? Seriously? He kept saying, with one of those laughs that indicates not quite disbelief but amazement that such a thing could have happened. He thinks if I upgrade the memory and use a portable hard drive to back up the system, I might get another year out of the machine, but he said I'm on some serious borrowed time now. (Borrowed from the three previous PC laptops, maybe? Every one of those died a fiery death within a year.)

Yikes.