Brand new 17'' PB = loads of trouble! Help!

Hello guys,

I've been experiencing some menacing problems with my brand new Powerbook and since I'm 1.a Mac newbie and 2.running out of ideas I finally decided to post here. Here's the story:

I bought a brand spanking new Powerbook 17'' G4 1.33 with 512 ram, 80gb hdd, and an extra 512 mb a couple of months ago. Ever since I've had it it acts like a crappy windows machine - crashes quite often for no apparent reason even though I keep everything in shape and don't really have anything else running but photoshop, illustrator, flash, icq and itunes running.
Still, the thing freezes, kernel panicks and whatnot. At first, cause I'm coming from a Windows background I was ready to accept the occasional crashing as "normal" and was quite surprised to hear from many mac owners that their machines have never crashed before. By that time I was already thinking "wtf, how does it happen that for some people the mac works flawlessly and for me it crashes every so often".

So I do whatever comes to my mind - reinstall (luckily when I got it I made two partitions, so reinstalling isn't exactly a big deal), update - still no solution. Clean install, nothing else put on. Crashes. So hey, I sit down and read - it must be bad ram. I get all enthusiastic that removing that pesky 512 kingston chip should solve it (btw, when I opened it I noticed that my other chip was produced by a company called..hycent or something like that? should it say "apple" on it?). Anyway, I open it, touch the metal case and all that crap, remove the Kingston RAM and gasp. It works....


..for about two days. Then it started dying all over again. Programs just CRASH out of the blue, giving me a wonderful

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00000006

So I'm thinking "dude, it must be the other ram chip that's working". So I swap them, put in the Kingston. Even bloody worse, the Kingston kernel panicks every second, I can't do a proper disk permissions repair and it's a general nightmare. I suppose that's going to go and get replaced. But, that still doesn't solve anything - the PB doesn't miraculously stop crashing as it seems to do with everyone else when i remove the extra ram

Eventually, what I've done right now is - done a format on the system drive, freshly reinstalled OS X, put only the chip that was sorta working - hyntek, hundra or whatever it was. Bang - crashed the first time I started it. And by crashed I mean it just FROZE. I couldn't do anything but push the button to stop the mac. I was running software update to 10.3.7 and tried to do a repair disk permissions to see if anything's faulty. I restarted, did a repair disk permissions from the installation cd and now it seems to be working (I know it's irrelevant, but anyway, I'm trying to give as accurate info as possible).

So now I'm having a clean reinstall, no updates, just ol' panther, icq 3.4 installed and nothing else. Let's see how long it lasts. Could the kernel panicks occur cause I use programs that I have installed previously on my other partition and haven't reinstalled after doing a clean reinstall on OS X? Could they be messing up something with the application support or whatnot?

I'm seriously running out of ideas guys, this seems to be a completely random thing and I'm quite frankly, very frightened by the perspective of a bad MB or something like that (no apple support anywhere around me).

So to anyone who bothered reading all this and wanting to give some advice - cheers. I rely on this PB for all my work and without it being stable I'm screwed.

Thanks

Thanks guys, I was afraid that this is the only possible solution. Woe is me as there is no apple store around me or any place where I can get the thing serviced, but I suppose I'll have to go somewhere else and get it fixed. Hope I'll live the MAC experience one day.

Thanks for all the replies guys - seems like what I'm doing is I'll wait until I move to Germany(I wish I was in the States right now, seems like an easy thing over there to just send it over to them and get it fixed) in a week, buy AppleCare (seems I'll have use of it) and send the thing to get it fixed to one of their resellers over there. Funnily enough it hasn't crashed ever since I wrote this post (I went to check whether the processor performance is set to highest, but I think cause I had my energy settings optimized for maximum performance it was already set to Highest - thanks for that advice though). Then again, I haven't really used it except for browsing, cause I'm too scared it'll die on me and screw up some more work.

CanadaRAM - yup it's 1.33 - I bought it from Jigsaw (jigsaw24.co.uk), who are actually quite decent folks, been really kind with every request Iv'e had. I got a 1Ghz iBook with 768 RAM from them at the same time for a friend and his hasn't died or anything of the sort ever since he's been using it - suppose it's just bad luck and I got a black sheep I got it from them, cause Apple said "uhoh you need to wait 2 weeks for this machine" and Jigsaw said "no problem, you'll have your machine by tomorrow" - indeed I got it, talk about being prompt.

Thanks to all of you guys, been really helpful, I'll keep you updated.