*bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* is the sound of my head hitting my desk

[spacebug]

Okay.

So, after realizing about eight different ways that trying to get a backup at work was going to suck, I took Apple-store-genius friend J's advice and hauled the eMac down to Southdale so they could help me. From St. Paul, during rush hour, in a car with no AC. That was fun. And then I hauled it from the parking lot to the store, giving myself handsome bruises on my hipbones in the process. And then, after waiting an hour or so and seeing about a quarter inch of status bar and nothing that struck my fancy up in the "Trendz" section of the mall, I decided to go home. S4 brought it home after work was done. Yay. And then I hauled it up to work today, and I plugged it in.

I highly appreciate everyone's time and effort and everything. I really, really do.

...but it's still doing the *exact* *same* *shit* it was doing before it was wiped.

People who tell me macs are oh-so easy and maintenance-free compared to PC's can line up and kiss my bony little white butt.

Comments

[spacebug.livejournal.com]

Mostly- random freezing up, sometimes as often as several times within a half hour, sometimes less. The lesser variant of this was the mouse freezing up sporadically. We ran disk warrior on it and it didn't find anything wrong, so this was the next step. I'm hoping that it's not a hardware problem, as S4 tells me with emacs you basically just have to replace them.

[omaha.livejournal.com]

it could be a less drastic hardware problem -- bad ram.

[djnoise.livejournal.com]

The behaviors you're describing are consistent with a hardware issue. The least troublesome of this kind of hardware issue is something as silly as dusty contacts between components, or malfunctioning or faulty memory (which doesn't always show up on memory tests), the more annoying can be loose contact or solder points, or contact corrosion between components.

These things are difficult to diagnose, but especially if you see the same behaviour after the system has been wiped, the next thing to consider is always hardware.