New ram arrived today from OWC. I excitedly opened up my beautiful and new to me iMac, put in the ram and noticed a dot of electrolyte leaking from one of the capacitors. Just a dot... but the capacitor is definitely bulging. I put the new ram in, system recognises it, but after a minute of use the system hangs indefinitely and I have to power off manually. It worked reliably with 1.5 gb of ram; I don't know whether 2 gb is just too much for a compromised system to handle, or if the act of opening it up somehow burst the capacitor. I've fixed up loads of laptops with new hard drives and ram and airport cards et al, but I don't know how the electricals works to that extent.
Feeling rather tragic and very disappointed. It's absolutely perfect in every possible way except for one tiny component that renders it unusable.
Questions for the forum:
(a) Is it possible to get capacitors fixed?
(b) Does anyone do electrical work like that anymore for consumer equipment?
(c) How insane is the price likely to be for a $50 computer on which I have spent another $40 already? Keeping in mind I'm a full time student living off my dwindling savings?
(d) Should I keep an eye out for a motherboard on eBay, keeping in mind they're less likely to be available in the Australian market and I've never replaced a motherboard before?
(e) Should I just go and hug my remaining iBooks (one G3, several G4s, and a Powerbook G4 1ghz with a dead PRAM battery; waiting for a 'new' one to arrive from Poland) and the eMac 1.42 ghz that is too heavy for my desk and be glad I have some PowerPC goodness still in my life (while I do the rest of my masters on my occasionally unreliable i7 MacMini that never makes me feel as happy as when I'm using a PowerPC)?
If no one has answers, I'm grateful for any sympathy you can loan. There was something deeply enjoyable about seeing it on the desk and getting the software all fixed up. (TenFourFox has a brilliant Zotero plugin that meant I could write in Bean and it would populate the bibliography from an scan. It's a workflow I'm going to see if I can use from here on in, because inserting citations in Pages breaks my concentration. It's much easier to just type {Montgomery, 2015, p. 43} and have the bibliography populated at the end than it is to hit Command Shift E, type in the first few letters of the authors name, select the author, select the page input field, put in the pages, hit Ok, and then try to remember what on earth you were typing. And I've fallen in love with Bean. I've got 16 gb of ram in this mini, and Pages will still freeze on occasion.) I was having such fun and my fun seems to be over.
I feel a bit better typing this out, though, even if it is a bit of a screed, because I think some of you will know how I feel. My sister just rang, I spilled my woes out to her, and she couldn't understand my sadness. "I can loan you my laptop if you need it!" Which is gorgeous of her but it's not about a need for computing; it's about having something that was beautiful and useful and satisfying just go spang.
Feeling rather tragic and very disappointed. It's absolutely perfect in every possible way except for one tiny component that renders it unusable.
Questions for the forum:
(a) Is it possible to get capacitors fixed?
(b) Does anyone do electrical work like that anymore for consumer equipment?
(c) How insane is the price likely to be for a $50 computer on which I have spent another $40 already? Keeping in mind I'm a full time student living off my dwindling savings?
(d) Should I keep an eye out for a motherboard on eBay, keeping in mind they're less likely to be available in the Australian market and I've never replaced a motherboard before?
(e) Should I just go and hug my remaining iBooks (one G3, several G4s, and a Powerbook G4 1ghz with a dead PRAM battery; waiting for a 'new' one to arrive from Poland) and the eMac 1.42 ghz that is too heavy for my desk and be glad I have some PowerPC goodness still in my life (while I do the rest of my masters on my occasionally unreliable i7 MacMini that never makes me feel as happy as when I'm using a PowerPC)?
If no one has answers, I'm grateful for any sympathy you can loan. There was something deeply enjoyable about seeing it on the desk and getting the software all fixed up. (TenFourFox has a brilliant Zotero plugin that meant I could write in Bean and it would populate the bibliography from an scan. It's a workflow I'm going to see if I can use from here on in, because inserting citations in Pages breaks my concentration. It's much easier to just type {Montgomery, 2015, p. 43} and have the bibliography populated at the end than it is to hit Command Shift E, type in the first few letters of the authors name, select the author, select the page input field, put in the pages, hit Ok, and then try to remember what on earth you were typing. And I've fallen in love with Bean. I've got 16 gb of ram in this mini, and Pages will still freeze on occasion.) I was having such fun and my fun seems to be over.