crowdog66

Well, the mystery of what's wrong with the G4 was solved by the MacHelper tech: a bad memory slot. Not stick. Slot. This means that the amount of RAM the computer can hold has suddenly been drastically reduced.

And it took him about 2 hours to get to that conclusion, because for the first hour or so the damned machine worked perfectly. I mean, we ran diagnostic programs, opened multiple applications, painted in Photoshop, connected it to the internet, and so on and so forth, and it ticked along like a trooper. When it finally did start to go horribly wrong, the scientific method of pulling out memory sticks until it started working properly, then switching memory sticks back and forth, did the trick.

The total bill, including 3 new DIMMs to beef up the 8600 (hey, the tech was already there, and the memory was surprisingly affordable), was $387.60, which isn't that bad when you consider that he checked out the G4 top to bottom, cleaned the fan, tested the battery charge, and so on. It's especially not bad when you consider that a bad logic board could have run us $900 and up, at which point we would have been looking at getting a G5 instead, with all the attendant hassle and the inconvenience of continuing to work on the 8600 -- which, souped up or not, is still a pokey little machine compared to the G4 processor, in addition to producing annoying SCSI errors from time to time.

*crosses fingers, and sets back to work on Hardy Boys pages*