Her fourth encounter with Advokat Bjurman was not one of their scheduled
meetings. She was forced to make contact with him.
In the second week of February Salander’s laptop fell victim to an accident that was
so uncalled for that she felt an urgent desire to kill someone. She had ridden her
bike to a meeting at Milton Security and parked it behind a pillar in the garage. As
she set her rucksack on the ground to put on the bike lock, a dark red Saab began
reversing out. She had her back turned but heard the cracking sound from her
rucksack. The driver didn’t notice a thing and, unwitting, drove off up the exit ramp.
The rucksack contained her white Apple iBook 600 with a 25-gig hard drive and 420
megs of RAM, manufactured in January 2002 and equipped with a 14-inch screen.
At the time she bought it, it was Apple’s state-of-the-art laptop. Salander’s
computers were upgraded with the very latest and sometimes most expensive
configurations—computer equipment was the only extravagant entry on her list of
expenses.
When she opened the rucksack, she could see that the lid of her computer was
cracked. She plugged in the power adapter and tried to boot up the computer; not
even a death rattle. She took it over to Timmy’s MacJesus Shop on
Brännkyrkagatan, hoping that at least something on the hard drive could be saved.
After fiddling with it for a short time, Timmy shook his head.
“Sorry. No hope,” he said. “You’ll have to arrange a nice funeral.”
The loss of her computer was depressing but not disastrous. Salander had had an
excellent relationship with it during the year she had owned it. She had backed up
all her documents, and she had an older desktop Mac G3 at home, as well as a five-
year-old Toshiba PC laptop that she could use. But she needed a fast, modern
machine.
Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple
PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerPC 7451 processor with
an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive. It had BlueTooth
and built-in CD and DVD burners.
Best of all, it had the first 17-inch screen in the laptop world with NVIDIA graphics
and a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels, which shook the PC advocates and outranked
everything else on the market.