G5

Saturday September 30th 2006 03:46 PM PST

Years ago i took my Mac SE into Di-No computers to have it upgraded. I had two diskette drives on the front, and 1 meg of ram. The upgrade actually replaced one of the diskette drives with a 40MB hard drive, and got me up to 4MB of ram! That was the LAST time i ever took a Macintosh computer into a service department. Well at least until today.

Friday morning i walked into my Garage at about 7:30 AM to a smell that i know very well. Its the smell of burnt circut board. Something WAS REALLY burning. So i started with the most likely suspects, the older g4's on my rack. I had left my music server on for the last couple of days and it must have finally died. I smelled around it and it was pretty bad. Well it actually was bad all around the garage. I couldn't tell exactly if it was worse just around the g4's. So i turned on all my fans and started to air out the place. As the smell started to clear i took apart the first of my g4's and sniffed around. hmmm nothing.

Next the printer, my new camera battery charger, all the AC to DC converters in the garage, anything that i could think of. Then as the air started to clear of the smell i could really start to track down the origin of the smell.

I was getting closer to the G5.

But it was still running. It couldn't be the... hold on. Shit. It IS the G5. So i power it down and crack it open. drive bays don't smell. the CPU bay doesn't smell. AH fuck its the power supply! But how can it be? the Computer was still on and running when i walked in. Usually if a power supply dies, the computer is off. Hmmm.

So i run a little test and plug it back in and power it up. I keep my nose close to the power supply fan output and keep sniffing for the bad smell. Sure enough it runs for about 2 minutes then starts to stink. I run around to the front of the system and look through the vent holes at the front. I can actually see something on the bottom circut board glowing red hot! Ah shit. So power it down and run off to work. I don't have time to deal with this now.

So today for the first time in about 15 years i took a computer in for service. I tried to crack the thing open, but quickly abandon any attempt. The lower part of the computer that i need to get into houses all the liquid cooling system for the CPUs. I'm not ready to fuck around with this DIY project. Its a little over my head.

So i walked into the only good place around here i know. Nope, not the genius bar. thats right... Di-No Computers!! I didn't have to deal with the "cool-as-shit" apple attitude, and i had 2 guys looking at the computer within 30 seconds of walking in the door. We'll see how they finish up with this problem, but i've got faith in them.