Hello all, This is my first post, so I shall kick off my tenure here by telling of my most recent acquisition.
At a local used electronics store, I spied a QS tower, listed as "barebones" since it was missing the operating system (a seemingly easy fix). After inspecting the inside, and turning it on to confirm the flashing question mark, I plunked down a mere $50 for it. Even if I couldn't get it back on line, the $50 was cheap for the scavangable components inside. In its heyday in 2002, this beast would have run about $3000. In 2012, I just needed it to run some data programs I am building. Upon arriving home, I attempted to install X 10.4 on its 80gb hard drive. It kernel panicked from the install disk. A PRAM reset allowed me to install the OS. I set it to watch a DVD as a test run, and it seemed ok. At that point, I made the move for OS 10.5, which is required for the program I have written. Not long after, however, the kernel panics resumed. Sometimes I got the kernel panic screen with the text, and other times the screen would just drop pixels or have weird lines, and freeze. I eyed the video card or processors as culprits. First thing was to repair permissions, which took forever as they were a mess. The panics continued. In order to run hardware test, I had to remove an aftermarket FireWire800 PCI card. It checked out ok on loop mode after 12+ runs. I took out a ton of dust from the interior (there was an incredible amount caked on). I ran memtest over and over and indeed pulled out a bad unit of RAM (I should have known, since the sticker says VODI IF REMOVED). The panics continued. Processor intensive tasks seemed to egg on the panics; everything from C&C Generals to Spotlight indexing (mdworker in panic logs), to my own data analysis programs triggered the dreaded crashes. At my wit's end, I figured I would have to swap out video cards from my other G4 (466 DA) to narrow it down. Before trying that, I popped the heatsink off to inspect the processors. They were caked in dust just as the rest of the unit had been, and their thermal pads and grease were burned away. I applied Arctic Silver and hoped for the best. It turns out that was the trick! The processors had been overheating. This monster is now maxed out with RAM, with various PCI cards, and running my programs like a champ! The whole debugging process took about 2 weeks. --CIC -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
