Our lovely little laptop died today. The now extinct 13-inch PowerBook G4 that we bought three years ago gave up today when the hard drive failed. The guy at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store did some diagnostics and then pointed to the screen and said, “Oh, that’s bad.”

Replacing the hard drive is about a third of the cost of a brand new laptop, so we’re seriously considering the upgrade. We’re not loaded with cash at the moment, but I hate the idea of pouring money into such an old machine. But I doubt we can last long without it, so we’ll probably be doing something pretty quick.

I didn’t have much of importance on the laptop, but Abby did have a few things it’ll suck to lose. We do have some of it backed up, so it shouldn’t be a total loss. But it is a pain. It’s a good reminder to make sure you’re backing up. This is one reason why I like services like Flickr–it serves as a backup for all those photos. If my house burned to the ground I wouldn’t lose 4,000+ photos.