The adventure begins at Cox Computer Repair, 26 Broadway in Newport. Will Cox looks down at my beloved Apple PowerBook G4 laptop and shakes his head. While the sleek, aluminum-bodied device still retains its looks–I treat it like it's made of fine crystal–it's never been dropped, nor had motherboard frying Coke Zero placed anywhere near it. It is, Will reminds me, five years old. Five years. That's 35 in dog years, and evidently septuagenarian for computers.

The reason I'm at Cox Computer Repair is because my PowerBook, which is on its second keyboard, is failing again. The delete key (that's the backspace key for you PC folk), is not working. The quote key quit next. And then, complete and utter desperation: The space bar fails.

While you can work around the lack of a quote key, and even the delete/backspace (highlight the text and retype), if you are someone who earns their living at a keyboard, it is impossible to live without the spacebar. Your thoughts, your ideas, your words runtogetherwhilegoingandarrivingnowhere, falling off the cliff of your brain, down through your fingers and into a pit of unintelligibility. There is no available means to input. It's as if, in Jean Paul Sartre, existentialist sense, you have passed from a state of being into a state of nothingness.

Will, who lives his life and earns his living going to battle with hardware and software and uploads and downloads on a daily basis–an off-world of circuit boards, bytes and bits, and ones and zeroes that I can only look up and view from the ground as if from a Hubble telescope–and who's done hard drive wipes, file back-ups and general service on my PowerBook on a number of occasions, offers me two options. Replace the entire keyboard–again!–or purchase a new machine. Complicating this choice is the fact that a new keyboard, if you can find one for an Apple laptop two generations past its prime, may or may not fix the problem. It might actually be a motherboard issue, and the money spent to replace the keyboard a second time might actually go for naught.

Motherboard issue. Isn't that something I'd gotten past a decade ago, and paid dearly for, over the course of a year's worth of weekly 45-minute hours? But I digress.

The point is: I have to accept the demise of my beloved PowerBook G4–$3K, fully-loaded when purchased in 2005–and start looking for a new, or used, replacement model. Something to get me to work and back. And I have to do it fast.

Just like a car breaks down at the worst possible time–when you're running late for work, usually, or half-way to Stowe during a blizzard–my laptop has failed in the middle of a copywriting project for a PR client. And a deadline is looming.

Without a functioning keyboard on my laptop, I can't get to work. And interim options, like borrowing, or using a desktop computer or plugging in an external keyboard, are impractical for traveling to onsite meetings. Like taking the bus or relying on a train, when you really need to fly.

The good news, I learn when starting the shopping process, is that September brings back-to-school sales, not just for crayons and notebooks and pens, but affordable laptops targeted at students and the budget-conscious Moms and Dads who will (usually) pay for them.

While I'm not headed back to class, I am on a budget. The 15-inch MacBook Pro laptop I want is money I don't want to spend. Roughly another three grand after software. Besides, necessity has introduced the idea that the sun may not rise and set over Steve Jobs. And while I must admit to the recent folly of upgrading my simple Samsung cell phone to the Apple iPhone, (I was fortunate to get in before the 4S, death-grip dropped call debacle; My G3 generation iPhone drops plenty of its share of calls, rest assured), the prospect of saving two-thousand dollars by going PC, in a down economy, might be a good idea.

Before hitting the road, I stop first at Craigslist.org, their computer section. But what there is to buy, whether Apple, Sony or Hewlett Packard, is similar to what I have. Used laptops with one deal-breaking malady or another: Keyboards that don't work or are missing keys, others with broken screens, or "in perfect condition, but no longer turns on."

You get my meaning. Great deals.

First stop is Walmart, 199 JT Connell Highway in Newport. "Save money. Live Better." I'm all over that. It's practically a mantra. But when I arrive in the store's home electronics section where the laptop computers are arranged on a shelf, the various models on display look as if they've seen combat duty. Smashed and broken keys, dented bodies and sticky tracking pads. Attempting to take a Toshiba Satellite laptop out for a test drive, running my fingers over its keys, one or two of which are missing, I ask the employee working the aisle why the display models are so trashed.

"It's the kids," she tells me. "They come and hammer at them and break them. We'd like to try to catch them at it, but we'd have to have someone watching the whole time."

I ask her if she would be kind enough to remove the heavy security bar that runs the length of the shelf, securing the laptops, so that I could have better look at two brand models that interested me: Pick them up to access weight, examine their construction. I'll admit, I'm a very particular, careful shopper, but isn't that part of the 'save money, live better' program?

Besides, picking a laptop is not unlike choosing a mattress. Or a mate. If you spend on average four to six hours a day in bed sleeping, six to twenty hours a day at your laptop working, like a significant other, you better choose carefully. With the difference being that while you hope to grow old with your mate, you can pretty much count on having to replace your new laptop in three to five years because of the advanced aging phenomenon, AKA planned and perceived obsolescence.

"Sorry, I can't do that," Ms. Walmart says.

"Um, listen. I'm not going to grab it and run out the store," I assure her. "If you want, I can give you a driver's license and credit card. I just want to pick it up and take a better look."

"No, we're not allowed to so do that," she repeats for my benefit. It's true. I am hard of hearing.

I try to slip the laptop out a little further from under the heavy iron bar for better scrutiny and discover one reason the laptops are so beat up: the bar pins them against their scrawny little clam shells.

So much for living better.

At Staples, located at 870 West Main Road, in Middletown, and at Best Buy, literally next door, they have the display game down to an art. Inside Staples, it's not Moms and Dads and back-to-school kids laptop shoppers I see, but six or seven senior citizens, all circling the display table, ooooh, and ahhhing, over the features and shiny graphics. Makes sense. Nowadays, with email and Facebook, digital photos and streaming video, having a laptop or desktop model computer is probably the only way they ever get to see their grandkids. The laptops at Staples price anywhere from $879.98 for the HP ProBook, (too much), down to $374.98 for the Compaq Presario, (more like it).

But now personal feelings about brand start to kick in. Didn't HP allegedly violate the privacy of their employees, hiring private investigators to surveil and illegally obtain phone records of some of the people that work for them in an alleged corporate leak debacle a few years back? All because someone had talked to a reporter at CNET.com without clearance? Bad, bad computer company.

And isn't Compaq kind of the Ford Taurus of the computer world. Maybe I'm still a Mac guy, and will always be one. There's the PowerBook, the iTunes, the iPod to play the iTunes, the iPod Speaker docking station so the iTunes I purchase from Apple can really sound good, the iPhone and iPhone apps. Yeah, I'm Steve Jobs' bitch. By now, I should have a majority share in the company. Maybe I really do want to take out a second mortgage to afford the MacBook Pro I want.

But who sells Macs on Aquidneck Island? The nearest Apple store is at the Providence Place Mall. That's two bridges and a 45-minute trip down the death-defying Route 95.

You know you're an Islander when every trip off the island seems like an expedition of the Donner Party.

But wait a minute. Flint Audio Video, on East Main Road. They stock Apple laptops. And it's right next door to a Starbucks. I can shop for my luxury market laptop while on a caffeinated high from luxury coffee.

While the selection of Apple laptops at Flint Audio Video is not diverse, they do stock the usual suspects, the MacBook Air (thinner and lighter in weight), the MacBook (economy, at $999.00 for the 13-inch model), and the one I want, the MacBook Pro (which at $1799 without software, better improve the economy, given the cost).

I'm not feeling the keyboard on the new Mac laptops, however. Since the days of my PowerBook, the Apple designers have replaced the nice, wide and slightly concave soft-touch keyboard, which is given to fail, granted, but seemed made for me, to smaller, stubby key tabs, which feel, to my fingertips, kinda chintzy.

What's in a keyboard? Well, again, when you spend as much time on it as I do, and happen to be a terrible typist, which I am – 40 to 45 words per minute on a good day – a key board means everything. Have I found a motivation, other than stubborn Protestant frugality, (I'm not actually Protestant, but admire their frugality), along  with the will to save money and live better, not to buy a Mac?

After more online research, talking with friends, including a Newport couple who just purchased a laptop for their daughter for prep school, I've singled out the Toshiba Satellite, model 455, as the one for me.

Both Walmart, home of the smashed and imprisoned floor models, and Best Buy, sell, have sold, had sold, had on sale–just last week, of course, and for $50 less–this model. Which, they miiiigghht still have in stock.

"Just lemme go check," the nice clerk at Best Buys says, while I hold my breath.

Minutes later she appears with a spiffy cardboard box with a plastic handle. Mission accomplished.  I have a new laptop.

Wasn't that easy?