Tuesday I had the whole keyboard panel of my Macbook replaced.  (For free, actually, by Apple because the cracking plastic was a known issue with the model.)

I’d been planning to have the Geniuses take a look at my computer for general issues.  In the past few weeks I’ve been seeing more of the beach ball of death between keystrokes than I think is healthy for a daily-use computer.  But before I went to the Mac store I got advice from friends and family that involved removing infrequently used system extensions and applications, and running Disk Utility after booting from CD, and both these things helped with the speed problem.  (No more waiting thirty seconds to type a line, or switch Finder windows, or Firefox tabs.)

I did have the Genius Bar folks check the fan when they addressed the case problem because I’d noticed that it had been running loudly lately (as in, I noticed the noise of it, where I never used to mind it.)  The fan was fine.

Late tuesday night I turned my computer back on, and I heard the fan whirr on, a soothing quiet whisper.

And THEN my hard drive engaged, and it sounded like an attack of the killer coffee grinder.

I kept my computer running for exactly 15 more minutes.  I backed up everything, emailed a few working files to myself, and shut down.  My new hard drive is already in the mail, I’m hoping it will arrive today so that I can install it ASAP.

This all got me thinking.  How much off my computer can I replace and still recognize it as my computer?  Well, right now I’m using our family netbook, the faithful Asus Eee that Ben got so that he could access critical internet functions while we were away in Perú without carrying an obvious computer.  I can access my gmail account, have installed a few applications to make it feel more homey, but I tell you what – the dwarf-size keyboard and screen kind of give it away.  Oh, and the Windows OS.  And the lack of all my personal files, photos, music and settings.

I’m replacing  the hard drive but will restore all my settings and data back onto it.  I could easily replace RAM, external drives, the case, the camera, anything.  Even if it didn’t necessarily have all my data, I could probably still feel at home in it.  I could probably take all the data and OS and dress it up as a Dell and still feel that it was my computer.  What makes it my computer is a) its full-size computerness and b) accessibility to my stuff.

Those aren’t very stringent requirements.

Thankfully computers aren’t as complicated as people are.   I mean, take Ben’s brains, personality, stored memories, idiosyncracies, etc and put them in a new case, and I’m not sure he’d still necessarily be my husband.  What if his new face didn’t react to his thoughts and emotions the way his old one did?  Not a problem with computer hardware – there’s no unpredictability factor like there is with living beings.

What if I didn’t like what his new body smelled like?

What if any component were left out?  What if his personality, facial expressions, intelligence, etc were transferred but his long term memory not?  What if he had the memory but didn’t have Ben’s logic.

This is hurting my head, and I think I need to stop.  Thankfully it was my hard drive that failed and not Ben’s brains.  I will now carry on with my productive day.