The Continuing Saga Of The Mac That Won't Start:
Went to the Apple Store yesterday, they were able to start it from an external boot drive thingy, and then we disconnected that and restarted it a few more times for good measure, declared it fixed, and I took it back to the office.
Where now, naturally, it's doing the same won't-boot-you-can't-make-me-you're-not-my-Dad thing it was doing yesterday.
I've ruled out peripherals (swapped 'em out with the working Mac and they work on that one but not here), power cords (ditto), outlets (tried several), and even tried manually opening up the DVD drive, putting the installer disc in, and booting from that. No go.
What the fucking fuck is going on with this machine???
Oh, and when I came in this morning, one of the clocks on the wall was set an hour back AGAIN. Which in a way is even weirder than the Mac not working because the clock (a) runs on BATTERIES and (b) IS A CLOCK. A complicated machine like a computer I expect to have random weird issues from time to time. But a freaking WALL CLOCK???
If I wanted to upgrade laptop memory (say, from 1GB to 2), would I need a perfectly matched set of memory? Or would two...what do you call them? Cards? Would two pieces of memory from two different manufacturers work together, as long as the technical specs were correct?
I have not generally had a problem with mixing and matching different memory of the same specs. Make sure you know what is installed in your computer. If you have two slots and 1GB of RAM it may be in two 512MB modules and you will be forced to get two new modules to get up to 2GB.
Depends on the laptop.
Where would I check for information? Owner's manual?
If you have two slots and 1GB of RAM it may be in two 512MB modules and you will be forced to get two new modules to get up to 2GB.
Right. Hmm. The current leading contender says "both memory slots may be occupied." That's...not useful. It's got a maximum capacity of 4GB, though.
Where would I check for information? Owner's manual?
Yep.
Perhaps you could find the owner's manual online, if you don't have it handy....
If you post the manufacturer and model number we can help look up the specs too.
2GB of ram is like $40 - $50 so you might just want to assume you have to replace all the memory for comparison shopping. If you don't need to replace the existing memory then, bonus.
The current contender is a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7422.
[link]
I've been running under the assumption that I had to have a matched set of memory...sticks? modules? Anyway, assuming that I had to have two 512MB, or two 1GB. I think our desktops run like that. But the stuff I'm reading sounds like you could actually have one 512 and one GB.
TroubleMac Update #1250981238:
So...it seems to be the graphics card. The thing that was different in the Apple Store yesterday that I didn't twig to until today was that they didn't plug it into an Apple Cinema Display. Which I hadn't tried here until this morning, but voila - success!
And the Applecare support person just tried to tell me to "just keep using that Sony display you're using now," as if the problem had been solved....um, no. Because that would turn my Apple monitor into a $3000 paperweight. Kind of unacceptable. If my graphics card is dead, I need a new one as is covered by my Apple warranty. End of story.
So now I'm back on hold. Whee!
