Well, I no longer have a Macbook. At least temporarily. Thursday morning I discovered that my battery would not hold charge, actually the machine failed to detect the presence of a battery at all. I followed all the procedures outlined by the Apple support website, but still no luck. So yesterday I dropped the machine in to the nearest Apple centre.

Naturally, none of the techs work weekends so nobody will even look at the machine until tomorrow. I’m also having the top case changed to get rid of the grubby yellow marks, that will probably take about a week. I haven’t read much recently about the discoloration issue, but to my knowledge it has been resolved – so I have a brand new battery and shiny white top case to look forward to when I get the unit back.

One of my friends just bought his second Macbook this weekend, after having sold his original Black model. I couldn’t see any major difference between the Core 2 2.0GHz and my 1.83GHz Core 1. I expect once Leopard arrives and with it, applications that can use EM64T – we will start to see a bit of a performance difference.

At the Apple store, I had a bit of time to play with the Macbook Pro that was on demo, it’s really hard to decide whether to keep my Macbook or not. If I sell it, I can put the money back towards saving up for a new MBP. Although it would mean going without a notebook for at least a few months. I’m not sure which I’d miss more, having a notebook, or just having something that doesn’t use Windows.

I can’t sleep tonight, not sure why. I didn’t purposely sleep in too late as I knew I had work tomorrow (today). An Xbox 360 torrent I was downloading finally finished, and it actually worked. Shame the dual layer DVD+R discs are so expensive, it would also be nice if there was an easier way to flash the optical drive firmware to play burned discs. It was Rainbow Six Vegas, which looks stunning in 720p – my only gripe was the lack of physics and feet. What is it with all these flashy games overlooking such a simple thing as feet.

It’s not my 360, otherwise I’d probably be up playing right now. I thought about getting one a little while ago but decided it was still too expensive and I probably wouldn’t get enough use out of it. So I upgraded one of the hard disks in our server today, swapping out a 200GB for a 400GB IDE. Although with all the new stuff coming out recently I can’t see that free space pie graph staying purple for long. I think purple is the free space anyway, I’d check it but I’m on OSX. Speaking of which, another build of Leopard leaked a few days ago, I’m yet to see any new screenshots or lists of added features but I doubt we’ll see anything major until launch.

A friend of mine was keen to go to the Windows Vista launch tonight, why anyone would bother is still beyond me. I keep seeing all these stories on Digg about how hard Microsoft is pushing this launch, although I’m yet to see any evidence of that here yet. Naturally DELL is offering free upgrades and the usual marketing crap, but it’s not like I’ve seen television or print ads from Microsoft. I believe tomorrow will be the first day we’ll (work) be legally able to sell copies of Vista – I wonder if we’ll get any punters.

Microsoft seems to have made sure to look after the multi-nationals first, offering them all the stock and exclusitivity of the “Upgrade” versions, last time I looked we still could not purchase them wholesale – only the OEM full versions. Which I believe can only be installed fresh, not upgraded to. Anyway, I’m going to try and catch some sleep again – make sure to check out Steve Jobs’ prank call to Starbucks (check the Tech column on the right hand side).