Sick PowerBook

Remember that old PowerBook that I retired in September?
Well, lucky for me, my wife is pretty darn smart. I was preparing to wipe the drive clean and toss it in the garbage when she suggested I take it to the Philippines:

"You should take it with you," she said. "What if you have problems with your new computer?"

It was pure prescience, I tell you. The day the movers came to pack the house, I encountered a strange message that said "You need to restart your computer" in four different languages. It was frustrating to get an error message I had not encountered in my decade of using Macs, but I had no time to figure out what to do about it, and restarting the computer seemed to resolve the issue, at least temporarily.

Things got worse. Using Microsoft Word at LAX and Narita, the PowerBook crashed a few more times. Over the past two weeks, it got worse and worse, to the point Tuesday where it happened four times in 10 minutes.

My research indicated that it was a kernel panic, essentially an error that the operating system cannot recover from. The gray, multi-lingual screen is Apple's version of the Windows Blue Screen of Death.

I uninstalled all the shareware and freeware programs I had downloaded, reinstalled the system software and eliminated, to the best of my ability, any other potential software issues. The hardware tests I ran indicated that I probably had some bad RAM, which meant it was time for a trip to one of Manila's four Apple Centers, where I met Mr. Jeff, who agreed with my diagnosis but wanted to recreate it himself.

(Of course, when I decided that I needed to take the PowerBook to the shop, it stopped acting up, much like your car will when you take it to the mechanic and you're forced to play the "I swear it was making the noise on the way here" game. The Apple Center receptionist was sympathetic, at least. "They always do that, don't they?" she offered.)

Finally, the PowerBook did panic for Jeff, so he replaced the memory on Friday and has had no problems since, with every application up and running, he said when I talked to him today. But, the memory he installed is apparently just one he uses for diagnostic purposes, rather than one that I could, say, take home with me.

"I had to order the chip from Singapore, so it will be next week before it's ready," he told me.

Next week could mean a lot of things. It could mean Monday, it could mean Friday. Unfortunately, next week is a big holiday week in both the Philippines and Singapore, so it means Thursday or Friday rather than Monday or Tuesday.

The truth is, I have everything I need on this old machine I'm using, and it served me perfectly well for three years, so I can't complain too much. It even has the bulk of my iTunes collection on its tiny hard drive. And, it doesn't have kernel panics.

And thanks to Shelly, it's here with me rather than sitting in a landfill at home.