Bummed ( Part I )

I'm a geek, so I'm all about the toys.  This is the story of a broken toy -- a toy that was supposed to be really cool, but instead turned out to be an expensive time-consuming hassle I didn't need.

What the hell am I talking about?  My new G5 tower.

On Friday, I received a refurbished Dual 2GHz G5 tower.  I was pretty excited.  I planned to use the tower to do a whole bunch of fun stuff at home that I don't like to do on my PowerBook, because these things need more ... er ... power than the PowerBook can muster.  Typical projects include: fun with GarageBand, Photoshop, Flash development, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, etc.

Friday night I rushed home and started setting up the G5 immediately.  It came with Mac OS 10.4 pre-installed, so I started downloading the latest from Software Update.  The download seemed to be unusually quick, so I opened Activity Monitor to check out the download speed.  Got bored with that pretty quickly and launched Safari, and ... SPLAT!  System panic.  Crap. 

I ran the Apple Hardware Test on the machine, and the RAM test failed.  Great.  They sent me a machine with bad RAM.  Well ... ok.  I wanted to add RAM anyway.  I went to Fry's, got 2GB of compatible RAM Saturday morning, and tried the tests again.  All tests passed.  Cool.  A few hours wasted, but I'm up and running.  Start installing a few apps and ... SPLAT!  Another panic.  Crap.

Maybe the System software is bad, I thought.  I mean ... all of the hardware tests passed.  I can't remember the last time that I ran on the system that was pre-installed.  Maybe that's the problem.

So, I rebooted from the restore disc, erased the hard drive, and re-installed a clean version of Mac OS 10.4.4.  Then, I tried a few things.  Ok.  Good so far, I thought.  So, I ran Software Update again, and began downloading the latest software.  Shortly before the big MacOS X 10.4.7 combined update finished downloading ... SPLAT!  System panic.  Crap.

Huh, I thought, being unusually optimistic.  Maybe this is some problem fixed by 10.4.7.  I'll just finish the download, reboot into 10.4.7 and ... SPLAT!  Ok.  This is really getting to me now.  Another reboot and I'm into 10.4.7.  Things seem ok.  Let's try something to stress-test the system. 

I started a drag-install of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (copying files in the Finder), thinking that the demos would be a good stress test.  Turns out copying the files was enough to panic the system again!

That was it.  I re-installed the original RAM DIMMs, put the machine back into the packaging and into the shipping box, and set it next to the door.

Tomorrow will be interesting.  I don't know what to expect.  I think that I will probably simply return the machine.  I don't know what Apple would try to repair on the system, because all of the hardware tests pass.  But, now a few strange details start to make sense.  The RAM DIMMs that Apple originally shipped in the machine were really scratched up.  I bet that the machine was originally returned due to these panics, and someone had tried re-seating the RAM several times.  Because the hardware tests all passed, the refurb group probably thought it was all set to re-sell.

-- to be continued --