Gore of my 450G2..

Yep, a shelf fell on that.

Picture taken on February 21, 2025.

Just yesterday I purchased a mid-2007 Mac Mini on Facebook Marketplace for $20, which certainly isn’t bad. It came with a power supply, 1GB (2x512mb) of DDR2 667mhz, and a core two duo at 1.83ghz. Overall, not a bad purchase. It came with Mac OS 10.7.8, though I elected to install 10.6 on it instead as I would probably get better performance.

The seller was about 30 minutes away by car, which wasn’t too bad. Afterwards, I had to help my grandma set up Windows 11 (I know, I know, but my Windows 10 installer wasn’t working!), and that’s when disaster struck. While I was standing there, helping with the computer, a terrifying series of texts are received from my brother, who was home at the time. The texts mentioned something about a shelf and a loud noise, as I had put up a new shelf over the weekend.

Now, the shelf wasn’t super secure in the wall, but it held for over a day with some load, so I figured it was probably okay. I had my Wii U games up there, my handheld consoles, and some laptops, specifically my Thinkpad T480 and my HP ProBook 650 G2. There is a mini-fridge in my room (against my will) that was under the shelf, with an HP ProBook 450 G3 sitting on it, hooked up to ethernet and whatnot and used as a server.

Unfortunately for me, the shelf and a significant amount of it’s weight crashed down and struck my 450G2, and wrecked the screen. I know that being there probably would not have saved my laptop, and I probably would’ve gotten hurt, but the agony of standing around in a house where I’m deathly allergic to the pets, all while I question what was broken and what wasn’t, wasn’t fun.

I suppose the price of getting a new computer has to be that another must suffer, so the next time I buy a computer, I’ll make sure to have a sacrifice ready just so I don’t lost a computer that was still fine.

I’ll write a proper blog post on the Mac Mini soon, but I just wanted to talk about my latest tragedy.