musings

If you’d read the comments on the previous post, you’d have seen that Brent Cameron suggested I try the Apple Hardware Test that came with my G5. A capital idea, I thought, and wondered why I didn’t think of it myself. I fired up the G5 and it took 15 minutes booting and never did finish so in annoyance I rebooted it with Command-Option-O-F held down to invoke Open Firmware. That worked just fine, and I was able to eject the CD and reboot the machine successfully. I held down Option to invoke the startup disk chooser and booted the Hardware Test. And after a couple of minutes of booting the machine’s fans spun up to hurricane-speed. I looked up at the screen and the hardware test had crashed. I tried again and still the same thing. I’m kinda stumped at this point. I think I’ll just get a rig of external drives and populate them with the drives out of my G5, and then get a shiny new MacPro when I’ve got a bit more spare cash.

So it seems my much beloved PowerMac G5 is well and truly b0rked. It’d been behaving very badly for the past few months – from general flakiness like graphical corruption in the Time Machine interface, and the iTunes library getting corrupted every couple of days (requiring a restore from the Time Machine backup) through Safari and Mail crashing on launch all the way to kernel panics and random freezes. I’d kinda written this all off as symptoms of having done in-place upgrades from Panther to Tiger to Leopard, but after I returned from India, I found that the lockups were far more frequent than before. In fact, I could get LightRoom 2.0 to reliably lock the machine up just trying to browse the photos I’d brought back from India. In an attempt to narrow down the problem (the machine vs. the photos) I put LR2 on my MacBook and loaded the photos onto that machine … and no problem at all. Works a treat (and fast ; the G5 has nothing on the Core 2 Duo).

So I tried a clean install with a restore of the user data and applications from backup. No good. Still the same problems. Then I tried a clean install with just the user data restored. Again, no good. Finally a clean install. Guess what? Yeah, still no good.

I really need my computer, so I just shut the big bastard down and moved my daily computing to my MacBook. I love this little machine – it’s ever so fast, and thanks to the SSD, it’s ever so quiet. Still, I miss my 30” main screen and 24” secondary screen, so I decided to try and get the G5 up to shape today.

About a year ago, I bought 4G of RAM from Crucial and jacked it in alongside the 1G that came with the machine. At the time, it was a huge performance boost, but (perhaps faulty) memory seemed to think the stability issues arose with the installation of that memory. At the time, it wasn’t a big deal – the machine crashed once in a blue moon, but I didn’t remember it ever crashing before the extra RAM was installed. So I pulled it.

And the machine wouldn’t boot. At all.

So I pulled the original 1G and installed the 4G from Crucial.

And the machine wouldn’t boot.

So I replaced the original 1G and put the 4G from Crucial back in.

And the machine … booted? WTF?

But it was just as flaky as ever. Worse, when I looked at the system status, it said I have 4G installed. I double checked the memory and it’s all seated correctly. Either some of the memory is bad, or the memory slots are. Since this is a G5, the memory has to be installed in matched pairs – and the memory is slotted in as 512k/1G/1G in the primary and secondary banks. Since I’m seeing 4G installed, and the memory can’t be unbalanced, I can only conclude that the Apple-installed 1G is the culprit. But the machine won’t boot with the Crucial memory in the first slot, or without the Crucial memory installed. :/

I no longer know what to do, and I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that the machine isn’t usable any longer. My poor G5 served me well, but it’s time to move on.

The only thing is, a new MacPro is gonna run me another small fortune, and I don’t have one handy. At least not one that I’m willing to part with. The Mini isn’t up to snuff for what I want (it’s slower than my MacBook!), and the iMac is full of stuff I don’t need – I already have 2 giant screens. I wish Apple made a mid-range machine – a Mini that had the innards of an iMac, maybe in a small tower instead of the tiny brick, so it could have extra drives slotted in.

May’s 90 Tracks:

• 
  Hush by Asobi Seksu
  Another fine release from New York’s Asobi Seksu. This one steps back from the shoegazer leanings of the previous releases in favour of sweeter, more pop-oriented songs. I’m sure this one is going to alienate fans who came just for the feedback and swirl of the previous albums, but I rather like it.
• These Flowers of Ours by The Asteroid No. 4
• An Amazing Dream by The Asteroid No. 4
  I first heard The Asteroid No. 4 on the Sounds from Psychedelphia” compilation – the song “Tricks of the Trade” stuck in my head seemingly forever after. Like The Brian Jonestown Massacre, these guys take a great formula and run with it – any fans of 1960s psychedelic rock will find this right up their alley. Recommended.
• Man With The Movie Camera by Biosphere
  Yet more haunting and creepy ambient soundtrack from the masterful Geir Jenssen. It’s hard to say how it’s different from other Biosphere albums – they’re so minimal that casual listeners would probably think it all sounds the same. It’s not the best of Jenssen’s album (that title is held by Microgravity – one of the most haunting and creepy ambient albums I’ve ever heard) but it’s really good.
• Fallout by Front Line Assembly
  A collection of remixes and outtakes from the excellent Artificial Soldier album, along with three new tracks.
• Split by Jesu / Battle of Mice
  Two tracks each by the incomparable Jesu, and Battle Of Mice. I don’t understand the logic of this split single – the two Jesu tracks are slow and introspective, and the two Battle of Mice tracks are screaming aggression. It’s a lot like putting two early Sigur Rós tracks on a single with two early Sonic Youth tracks. It’s all good, but the pairing is incoherent. That said, it’s well worth the download.
• Lost Alone by Mind in a Box
  Introspective synth-pop from video game music composer Stefan Poiss. Not bad, but a bit repetitive.
• Sabresonic II by The Sabres of Paradise
  Is there anything to be said about The Sabres of Paradise other than “They were brilliant?” I don’t think so. Get it. Get everything they did. It’s hard as hell to find on physical media, so EMusic is really the best way to get it now.
• Linienbusse by Studio Pankow
  I downloaded this in the mistaken belief that it was Italian electronic duo Pankow, last heard from in the 1990s. It sounds kind of like acid-jazz done with synthesizers. Not bad at all.

Looking back the past three months, it reads like I’m one of those guys that just likes everything, because I keep giving everything positive reviews. Thing is, between eMusic’s previews, allmusic and the other review sites on the internet, it’s pretty rare that I’m downloading anything that’s unlikely to appeal to me. So I’m not so much reviewing albums as I am attempting to describe why I like them.