One of the reason people have purchased Macs over the last 25 years has been quality. For years I didn’t really get to see a Apple product till it was at least four years old. Then we usually did a system upgrade, RAM upgrade and Hard drive upgrade to give it another four years. Sometimes a new battery. The only ones that had to have the newest were the advertising agencies, the kid gamers and me. Me because I needed to know the new machines. My attitude is that if a Mac will do the jobs you want it to, why replace it? Look in your yellow pages at the number of Mac technicians vs the number of PC techs, usually 50 to 100 to 1. Your PowerBook is so new it won’t even boot from system 9. How often do you use your CD drive? Here’s a option: get an external USB CD/DVD drive that will move to your next computer, as you said you haven’t used it for ages. Contact iFixit and if they don’t have it they can direct you to a good one. http://www.ifixit.com/Info/contact