Iced in
You can slip on the grass outside if you’re not careful right now. Everything is coated in ice, except oddly enough, my back porch. We haven’t salted it, it just seems immune so far. I’m hoping our tree out front will survive. One good thing about all this cold and ice is it will put a very large dent on the insect population next year.
My sister was supposed to arrive at 7pm last night, but because of weather I had her reschedule her flight to Monday for a 5pm arrival. I think even if she hadn’t it may have taken us until then to get to the airport form here. I am not afraid to drive on snow and ice, but I am afraid of other Texans doing so at the same time I’m on the road. This isn’t common here and most natives do not know how to handle it.
My iMac is sick. I think it’s jealous of all the time I’ve been spending with it’s little brother the MacBook. This is the first problem I’ve had with it in 2 years (or at all for that matter.) I’m not exactly sure what has happened, but I’m thinking I let one of my photoshop plugins run away with itself on a batch causing some overheating. This is one of the G5 17″ G5 models that always ran hot to begin with. I’m troubleshooting now. I did this convenient hardware test that’s built in and I had no idea about. The deeper I dig into this the more it seems like I may have done it to myself by accident. Right now it’s looking like I’ve installed something that runs automatically on login and is hanging. Whoopsy daisies. I’ll update this once I have it sorted.
Today will be a mostly lazy day. I plan to stay in from the cold as much as Duncan will let me, maybe play some video games, and do a bit of computer work.
*Update* my iMac is diagnosed. What follows is a recipe for crispy fried ram:
Install beta software to load on startup. Leave hot iMac in high performance mode. Leave unattended. With a little luck that beta software will go nuts, keep respawning and in doing so keep your cpu maxed out, putting out the highest heat possible. This in turn fries the ram stick closest to the cpu.
Ok, so no more beta software for me in a situation where it’s always running. I’m going to contact my ram maker as they claim a lifetime warranty (it’s heatshielded for gosh sakes!) Hopefully they’ll do the right thing and send me a new stick, otherwise I’m running on a gig. I can get by fine at a gig, but I’m really hoping this company provides the excellent service they claim.
It looks like later revisions of the firmware on this imac don’t let the heat stay that high for extended periods. I haven’t been watching firmware updates as that’s something I really only want to update if I have a problem. Well I’ll be changing that practice now as well!
After taking out the offending ram module everything is working 100%, though I do notice when I have several programs open it’s not quite as responsive with 1 gb as it was with 2 gb.
No Comments
» Leave one of your ownNo comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Leave a comment