new MAC owner, a year in review

[Shuie]

Im actually typing this on my good old reliable IBM laptop because half of the keys on my MAC dont work. Again.

Here's a summary of my mac ownership experience....

Got an IPOD for Christmas of '04. Bought my 1st mac (the Mini) in July of '05.

The Mini required an immediate memory upgrade in order for it to be useable. Two failed proprietery keyboards. And yes, I went and bought the nifty plexi glass real mac keyboard that costs twice what a normal keyboard would cost. Machine freezes up requiring a reboot every 5 minutes now. Its like the dreaded blue screen of death, except that all I get is the blue screen without the 'fatal error at memory location (insert hex address)' message. Friggin scanner doesnt work after the machine loses connectivty for the 1st time after the reboot, requires another reboot to fix. Printer works a little better than the scanner, but is still flakey, requires reboot to fix. Salespeople that sell you an upgrade to a product that they know you don't own.

Oh, and the iPod. Requires an update every two days or it wont play any of the hundreds of dollars worth of iTunes that Ive purchased.

Thankfully, my popup problems (which I never had on my last XP PC after installing a few spyware removers) have been solved.

Im a database guy that learned to program in UNIX and Ive architected ERP systems by myself. Im not exactly inept with Windows or UNIX based operating systems. The next elitist mac snob that looks at me like Im too stupid operate a keyboard and says something like '....well, my MAC never does that' is getting a mini thrown at them. You can have it. Its garbage.

Well, that concludes my mac ownership experience. Im calling Lenovo for a new laptop today since they are on sale for about the same price as the mini.

[motion]

Probably bad ram. Mac's are extremely fussy about the quality of ram used. Take out the ram you added, run Yasu (free download) to get her patched back up and see what happens.

[1967 R50/2]

Sorry to hear about your problems.

I've had a Mac now for 18 months and it has been completely 100% trouble free. Hope this doesn't happen to me.

Bottom line is, if it's not working, junk it and find something that does.

[Joeaksa]

Was always happy with the IBM laptops. Hope that the new owners do as well.

[nostatic]

your experience is 180 degrees from me. I haven't been trouble free, but I've used a LOT of macs over the years, and I use them hard, doing audio and video editing, web development and serving, etc.

Agree with Richard. Sounds like cheap RAM. And there are a few bad machines out there. But your experience is *not* typical.

[RickM]

I agree...sounds like bad RAM.

[bryanthompson]

Sorry to hear about your problems... I've only had problems with the first iPod I bought, but they replaced it super-fast and everything is happy now.

I picked up an Intel Dual-Core Mini yesterday. Holy crap is it fast. My apple family is growing... 12" powerbook G4, Quad G5 w/ 20" Cinema, iImini Duo, and 3 iPods. w00t!

[id10t]

One more vote for bad ram. Consider running a memtest of some sort on it...

[techweenie]

Absolutely positivvely: you put in cheap RAM. Take it out and it'll be the best computer you ever owned.

[RKC]

Sorry to hear about your problems. Ditto the comments above about RAM.

I have a PowerMac G5, Powerbook G4 and a Mac Mini, and they've been flawless. To be fair, my two Dell laptops never had hardware trouble either - I just enjoy OSX a good deal more than Windows. For my small company, to set up a network for the employees, shared printers, etc., all seemed much easier and less troublesome via Apple. We do web design, print design and accounting on the Macs; I use one Dell for games for the kids at home and the other one for a strange little thing on an outside shopping/banking server in Atlanta that just won't work on anything but IE 6.

Hope the RAM helps.

[Shuie]

Okay, fair enough. Its been working for the last 6 months without the current seizing up issue, but I understand that RAM fails. Even the RAM the Mac guy sells. I didnt go out of my way to buy a cheap RAM chip for it, it was the chip that was recommended for the machine. How do I run a mem test?

Does bad RAM make keyboards fail? It certainly has nothing to do with my iPod. The keyboard thing has gotten worse and worse. First it was the space bar not working all the time. Now its the entire LHS side of the keyboard.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Went thru 3 sticks of bad expansion RAM in my G4 AlBook...with the really bad stuff the thing would kernel panic and die as soon as the machine got warm.

The last stick was pretty much OK except the machine wouldn't wake up from sleep 5-10% of the time. Got the "logic board" (motherboard) replaced after nearly bludgeoning the "Genius" at the local Mac store--and now she works perfectly.

Of course it's only a 1GHz G4 so I'm already thinking about getting something a little faster.

[techweenie]

All kinds of weird problems come from bad RAM. You'll think the OS isn't loading properly. You'll get kernel panics, etc., etc. It's really hard to diagnose because the problems are random. Unless the keyboards didn't work when plugged into other Macs, I assume that problem is also RAM-related.

Apple RAM is pricey, but there are quite a few companies that offer a money-back guarantee if their RAM isn't compatible. And I've taken advantage of that guarantee more than once. Apple's RAM spec is super-particular in terms of speed.

[nostatic]

I' ve ordered ram from these guys and never had a problem:

www.ramjet.com

As for the keyboard...could be a bad one. I think in my years of dealing with literally hundreds of macs I've seen maybe one or two bad keyboards...but it can happen. In general they are much better quailty than the cheapo ones that you get with a clone machine. The one I'm typing on now originally came with a G3 Mac, and I've beat the crap out of this thing...spilled food and coffee on it. Nary a hiccup.

Just drink the koolaid and be happy

[Shuie]

Keyboard was smoked. Bought another new one and Im using it now. I should have gotten a picture of it when I took it out of the package and damn space bar fell off of it . I popped it back in place and everything seems okay now. Im going to turn hibernate/power saving mode back on to see if the freeze problem went away. If thats still an issue, which I expect, I've got the number for the Samsung chip that Apple says I should be using. 18004memory.com has it for $110.

[ZLP]

I just bought a 20" iMac Dual Core and love it! I will never go back to PC's....

[rrsrsr]

An old coworker of mine had a 17" powerbook. This was about 2 years ago, but in the first year he had it I know of at least 3 occasions that he needed to return it for service (it seemed to 'fry' itself every now & then running 3d modelling software... nothing crazy just FormZ mainly).

I didn't keep up w/ him after that, so not sure if he stuck with it or not, or if Apple ever cured the problem.

It was an excellent computer to use when he had it, but for what it costed I would have hoped for better reliability. It was the only Apple in a windoze office, which probably didn't help Apple's image in the company very much!

[rrsrsr]

On the other hand we just bought a $500 compaq laptop a couple weeks ago (well $560 with memory upgrade).

Not sure how long it will last (seems relatively well built though).
$560!?!

[930addict]

Sorry to hear about your problems with the MAC. Mine has been trouble free for over three years now. Same keyboard. Same mouse. Hope the new RAM fixes the issue.

[Shuie]

Freezing up problem seems to be gone with the new keyboard. I turned all of the power saving utilities back on and the computer wakes up just fine now. Just doesn't make sense to me.