The incredible warranty...

The last week or so I’ve been doing the upgrade thing to the equipment I have around here. This is something I’ve put off for as long as I could but now I am left with no choice. It’s part of the process of getting all the ducks in a row - setting up the equipment the way I want it and upgrading everything too.

Well, I installed Tiger on my G4 dual which was very straightforward... and then the problems began.

Everytime Apple plugs their latest and greatest, they usually haven’t worked out all the kinks (as evidenced by all those ‘little’ 40 and 50mb maintenance releases). So, I installed Tiger and then all of a sudden I had a Tiger by the tail!

The machine would start up and a screen would come up telling me I had to restart.

Gggggrrrrreeeaaaaatttttttt.

Either I got the screen telling me very nicely I had to restart or I simply got a prompt up on screen. In the back of my mind, I hear the voice telling me that this was the inevitable outcome of upgrading and I wince.

I look around the piles of detritus which have clustered near my desk and among them I find a forgotten treasure. Suddenly, I am very thankful of my inclination to hoard. The book Mac OSX The Missing Manual is a godsend as I find the resources to begin troubleshooting my problem. In short order after thumbing through the index I am launching directly into terminal and entering the commands to run a disk check. All my results come back okay so, it’s more reading to see if I can discover the cause of my problem.

A bit later I am pulling cards out of the machine in a logical sequence trying to isolate the offending piece of hardware. At last, I discover the two memory chips I purchased way back when don’t play nice with the new big cat on the block. So, I pull them and now the tower is running with a less than awesome 128mb of RAM but, it’s booting up.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I’m remembering something about a lifetime warranty that comes with the memory. I dive into the mountains of paper I’ve saved and come across the packing slip/receipt from my memory purchase surprised it is dated ’01 (have four years really passed?!). I go online and find the vendor’s site, nose around for awhile, generally upset at the prospect of having to shell out money I don’t currently have for replacement chips.

On the odd chance there really is something like a lifetime warranty, I call the vendor and have a long discussion with one of their salesmen.

And... there is a lifetime warranty!

And... I’m not the only person who has been having these problems with Tiger (much to the consternation of chip vendors) as the memory checks it runs at startup cause a heap freeze and it’s a fairly common occurrence.

So the surprise of the day is the chips I purchased four years ago can be returned and the vendor will send out replacement parts within 48 hours! Simply amazing!

More on this after everything is done but I will plug the people Coast to Coast Memory at 18004memory.com