This afternoon, as I was working on my blog, I got up to go to the bathroom, only to return to an all too familiar site. My Apple G5 had unceremoniously crapped the bed.
I noticed that the cursor wasn’t responding, so I checked to make sure my Wacom tablet was connected properly. All good there. I hit a couple of key commands trying to force a restart. Still nothing. I held down the power button on the front of the machine for a few seconds until everything went dark. Ok. Finally we are getting somewhere. I pushed the power button again, listend to the fan whirl back to life and…
Blink, blink, blink.
Uh oh. The computer isn’t booting up, but it looks like it’s trying to tell me something…
Blink, blink, blink.
What the computer was tying to tell me was that I had installed incompatable RAM. Simple mistake. It must happen all the time. At least, it happens frequently enough that the machine knows how to tell me about it in morse code. There was only one problem. I’d been using the same RAM in that machine for the past 3 1/2 years.
Uh oh.
What I appeared to be dealing with was a sudden absence of logic. Sometime while I was in the bathroom, my logic board had decided to shuffle off, leaving me with a rather large, and rather heavy, doorstop.
Of course, I’m only assuming at this point that it’s my logic board. To find out I’ll have to take my 4,000 lbs. little friend to a Mac Store and pay to have them take a look (my AppleCare ran out last February). Still, my gut is telling me logic board, which means my gut is telling me I’m about to make a very expensive decision. Either I spend somewhere in the neighborhood $800-$1,400 to repair or replace the logicboard, or I scrap the whole thing and replace it with an entirely new computer. This is a decision I’ve had to make before… on more than one occasion.
Through all of this I can’t help but wonder why I still have to make these kinds of decisions at all. Web 2.0 was supposed to put an end to the software adoption cycle, but what about the hardware adoption cycle? Why am I still buying bigger and faster machines to do simpler and simpler stuff? Last I checked, the program getting the most use on my computer was Firefox. Some days the majority of the programs I use, (wordpress, mediawiki, etc.) aren’t on my machine at all. They’re on a server farm somewhere in California!
Thankfully I have a backup. It’s a 12″ Macbook that, quite frankly, does everything my tower did except take up space and make funny noises. Maybe I’ll hold off on repairing my tower until I can figure out why I needed a big workstation in the first place. Or until I want to access my 70 gig itunes library…
Uh oh.
About The Author - My name is Stirling McLaughlin. I am married. I am an Art Director, Designer and Illustrator. The opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer. I have lots of ideas. I have a baby girl named Nika Bean. I live in New York City. When I was in college, they put me on TV because I wore a mask and yelled at people. I have a reality show that I wil be starting… any day now. - See My Portfolio
