magnetonic

Normally, I consider myself a lucky guy. I've got a great family, good friends, the best financée, a nice cat, a roof over my head, a well-paying job, etc, etc.

And of course, you all know I just got myself a new computer.

Some of you may remember I bought my first Apple products way back when I was still living in Toronto. I was on my way to Korea and I decided I wanted a laptop, because, you know, I was only going for a year... we all know how that turned out.

Anyway, I bought the wonderful iBook which has served me faithfully these past two and a half years. Only once did it fail me, but I got it fixed and it's been great. I also bought an iPod. The first one.

You may also recall that the power adapter for my iBook was defective out of the box. Luckily the store replaced it right away. As well, my iPod's battery was also defective out of the box. The store couldn't replace it, so Apple did. The latter seemed to be a chronic occurence.

Now, after the iPod incident, I told myself, don't buy the first generation of anything anymore. The fact that the first two pieces of Apple hardware failed on me didn't deter me from Apple products. Not at all. In fact, I love them. I'm a Mac geek now. If I was better looking or more witty, maybe I could make a "Switch" commercial, but alas.

Now the iMac. It's the first generation of a new piece of hardware. I told myself before don't buy it. But how could I resist? It's beyond words how much I love this thing already. Except for the fact that it crashes randomly all the time.

This is not normal behaviour. The iBook doesn't crash. Only rarely. And a brand new computer? Doesn't make sense.

What is it with me and Apple? Why do those slick white plastic rectangles hate me?

So I'm chatting with Jay, a support agent on Apple's new chat service. He asks standard help centre questions and finally tells me that I should reinstall the OS. It's not a problem because Mac OS X is sweet and takes less than 30 minutes to install and I've got all my important data still on my iBook. But it seems drastic. And not really useful since it's a brand new install, less than 48 hours old. I agree and I ask how do we proceed afterwards? He says, give me the date of purchase. I say wait a moment. The computer freezes. What Irony.

I fire up the iBook and get back online. I can't find Jay, so I'm stuck with Charlie, who's much more laid back. He gives me a reference number and I'm off.

I've got the install disc in and I run downstairs for a second. When I return, the computer's frozen. This isn't even Mac OS X proper, it's just the installer! Something is fishy. I install anyway and not ten minutes into my first session, it freezes again.

I load up the Apple Hardware Test CD. It's in Korean. Great. Actually, it's not so bad because a lot of technology vocabulary in Korean is just English. I do the tests and everything checks out fine. But I do look at the hardware profile and what do I see? DIMM0: empty; DIMM1: 256MB. Now is it just me, or aren't you supposed to put memory in the first slot?

I rip open the back of the iMac, which, by the way, is laughably easy, and switch the slot. I run the hardware test again, just to be sure. It's fine.

I've been running now with no glitches. I'm not gonna install any software, updates, even a printer. If it runs fine for more than 24 hours, I think my theory is correct: If you've got one stick of memory, put it in DIMM0!