A couple of months ago, David's powerbook started exhibiting a curious flickering on the screen. With some patient repositioning, it was possible to make it stop.
Over the last few weeks, the problem got progressively worse. The sensible thing, of course, would have been to stop, back it up, and send it off to Apple for repair. But with an estimated turnaround in the region of two weeks, that starts looking like an expensive option. And besides, he'll be on forced vacation in a few months when he becomes a father, so maybe we can limp along until then ...
... which brings us to the start of this week, when instead of booting the machine let out a plaintive series of beeps with the screen dead. Uh-oh.
After speaking to our local Mac service centre, it turns out that the beeps-of-death actually mean a memory problem, so we removed the RAM, checked it over, reseated it, and lo! the machine booted. Still with flickering screen, naturally. Unfortunately, for the past couple of days the machine has been randomly freezing. I put the memory into my machine and ran memtest against it, and it came up clean. So it seems like there's a dodgy connection somewhere in the machine.
Fortunately, we have a spare x86 laptop in the office, so a quick install of Ubuntu later and he now has a machine from which he can pull together the threads of his life again. Meanwhile, we're faced with the curious economic decision of one perfectly fine powerbook (*cough*) that may cost upwards of £600 to repair, versus replacing it with something like an iBook for around £600. Or giving up on this seemingly fragile Mac hardware and opting for commodity PC laptops, which we can dispose of guilt-free at the end of their 1.5 year lifespan.
This is just the start of what went wrong this week. And it's only Wednesday. Sigh.
Posted by savs at July 13, 2005 7:54 AM