Mac into the shop
Posted on March 7th, 2008
“Wow. That’s really interesting.”
These are words you don’t want to hear from the ultra-smart techie who’s examining the dozens of crash reports logged by your MacBook. But those are the words I heard when I took my laptop in today. The techie doesn’t think my many problems are due to bad software. He didn’t see any particular pattern, but suspects there may be some bad RAM in it somewhere (although I’ve run a RAM checker, and so did the shop the last time it was in).
He expects to have it for a week. And so for the next week I’m thrown back into the waiting arms of my Thinkpad, which, thankfully, I never upgraded to Vista. [Tags: macintosh taleof_woe]
Tagged with: mac
Hmm good luck. But I’n curious… why not simply swap out the RAM for new RAM? that’s 30 mins and if it IS RAM, you’re done?
Why don’t I do that? Because the machine is under warranty and I want Apple to buy me the RAM, if that’s the problem. Why doesn’t the shop do that? Maybe they will. Personally, I’d rather have them test the RAM so that if it’s bad, we know that that’s the problem.
Swap the disk – whole drive – for the drive in another machine of same make and model. A refurbished machine is fine at this point – yours is “slightly used” as well.
Take that home. Voila. You are working in the exact same environment you’d like to be. If the new one still crashes on you, some mysterious combination of software does something bad. If it doesn’t, the problem is in the other machine, in the electronics. (If it turns out to be in the software, let them *image* your drive, so they can muck around at will with your very, now known to be causal, configuration.)
Your experience is sounding like an intermittent bad connection somewhere in the main data path – RAM / Bus / Cache / CPU.
David – I had a similar issue, where my g3 powerbook would just sieze after a few hrs of use. I was unable to get the geniuses to be able to reproduce the problem, after hrs of testing, swapping ram, hd’s. I had it in at least 3 times before I was able to convince them to replace the mobo again, and it resolved the issue. I believe that sometimes there is hardware flakyness that can be very elusive to track down. Don’t give up on it, if it keeps happening, keep bringing it back.
AO
yeah, that makes sense. Good luck and I hope this gets straightened out for you soon.
David,
not sure where this is at, but I just ran across this:
http://www.windley.com/archive.....lity.shtml
If you happen to use Parallels… check that out (if not, ignore).