My Mac crashed on me, and I lived to tell about it.
I’ve been a Mac user now for 24 days; and I’m loving it. I’ve been anxious to write several blog posts about the highlights of my experience in switching to a Mac + PC workstation. I have several stickies on my desktop with notes about what to include in these blog posts; and to be sure I’ll still write them.
But my experience just 15 minutes ago with my brand new 24″ iMac scared me like my Windows machine has never done before; and has prompted (or incited) me to be active on this blog.
I’m really getting the hang of the Mac OSX system. I’ve already purchased Coda for a development environment and I have lots of things going on at once when I’m developing. This is about the time when a kernel panic decided to happen. I’ve read about it before. The Mac equivalent of the famous Windows blue screen of death. But I have now experienced it first hand. Some people even think this is a good joke (and it is).
It happened when I had clicked on a link in my browser, so I figured perhaps some javascript had really done Firefox wrong and in turn messed everything else up. So per the on screen instructions, I held the power button down to reboot. I was greeted with 2 low beeps, followed by 3 beeps (repeated). Not cool. I was initially a bit upset (read: mad)… this is not supposed to happen. This is a Mac, right? I thought it’s just supposed to work.
I ran through standard problems: overheating (it does get hot), bad hard drive, bad motherboard. Unfortunately, it turns out the beeps meant bad RAM. I have switched over just about everything to my Mac (except e-mail), and I don’t have a backup Mac (yet) in case something like this happens. Lucky for me, I had bought 4GB of RAM to be used as a Christmas gift for my dad for his Mac. And lucky for me, the RAM is just about the only accessible thing on the iMac.
Sure enough, popped the 1GB stick out and put the new one in and it’s up and running again. Not cool Apple. Is this really the type of RAM you charge $700 for a 4GB upgrade? (No, I didn’t buy my 4GB from Apple). Could just be a fluke though, I’ll give them that. =) But it is frustrating… what if I didn’t happen to have that 4GB of RAM sitting around for Christmas? I would be dead in the water until I took it to an Apple service center or went and just bought (read: spent more money) for RAM.
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No fluke. The last mac I had with no trouble was in 1994. Normally extended warranties are for suckers, but Apple has so many problems with quality control AppleCare will save you money.
Was it the RAM the mac shipped with?
Yeah, it was the stock RAM. I would have contacted Apple Care if I didn’t think I would have to take it in and be without it for any amount of time; and if the 4GB I bought wasn’t so cheap.