As I said back in my very first post on this blog, I’ve recently swtiched to the dark side and bought an iMac. Yeah they cost a little more maybe and like a laptop they are hard to upgrade. But after ermming and ahhing about if for a while I finally decided I would bite the bullet and buy one. There’s a couple of reasons why, one is the design I will openly admit how much I love having it all in one unit no longer do I have a tower unit as well as a monitor, its all right there and it just all looks so much neater! On top of that I really love how easy it is to install software. I down load it and basically it just runs. Not like on a Windows box where it can take ages to run the install routine. The other thing I really like about my Mac, I love Mac OS X it comes with some great inbuilt features, spaces comes top of my list for the simple fact that I find uses for all the desktop space.

Don’t get me wrong they have their downsides as well. After 10+ years of being used to working with Windows, I now have to learn a whole different way of doing things. No longer can I just open up command prompt and work in Dos. I haven’t quite gotten around to messing with the terminal screen just yet. I wont say I dislike either system all that much. I’m a Windows user, I cant stop using Windows for the fact that my job revolves around being able to use Windows extensively. But by the same token I wouldnt ditch my Mac because I enjoy using that as my play machine. Windows is for when I need to do something for my day job and my Mac is for when I am doing stuff for my personal projects. I know you can get software like VMWare Fusion to run Windows on your Mac, but there are times when I just need to be using a proper Windows box.

Today, I’m thankful I kept my Windows box around. Last night, I booted my iMac up late on. Had a couple of things I wanted to get done before bed and some web pages I wanted to visit. Instead of the usual apple boot up noise, I get three loud beeps and a black screen. My first thoughts are “ut oh that dont sound good”. I’ve built, stripped and repaired a lot of PC’s over the last 10 years so I know when the Bios beeps on boot up it usually means something is amiss. Gut instinct told me it was a ram problem.

After a quick phone conversation with my mate during in which he did some Googling for me, I found out the beeps mean that there is something wrong with the ram the system has detected. Now when I bought the iMac I got a deal that included an upgrade from 1Gig to 2. So I knew where the ram slots where hidden, one thing I will say there, people tell me that they dont like Macs cause they cant really be upgraded, in all honesty the part of a PC that I most often had to upgrade was the amount of ram and here the easy of access to the ram in a apple wins hands down over a PC. I didn’t have to pull the tower unit out, fight with the side panel to remove it, move all the internal wires out of the way and struggle to get my hands past the processor heat sink. On my Mac I turned it on it’s side, removed one screw and just like a lap top im presented with the ram in easy reach.

I carefully checked both sticks of ram to make sure they are seated right, no effect. Next I remove one stick of ram, no effect. Replace that ram and take out the other module, the system boots up. Last night that was good enough for me, OK I’d lost a gig but that still left me with 1 gig enough for last nights needs, put the panel back on and take the stick back to the shop in the morning. This morning I decided I best do some more testing before I go there (last thing I need is to find I’m wrong and need to make a second visit to take the Mac down) so I took the panel off again, tried both sticks of ram, got my three beeps again. Took the stick out and it worked. Took out the working stick and put in the “faulty” one, crap it booted up fine. Tried the working stick in the other slot, the thing goes back to beeping three times. Lucky thing I tested it because it wasnt the ram that had died it was the memory slot on the mainboard.

Also lucky for me, I hadn’t gotten rid of my Window’s box. Because when I took it back to the shop they told me it had to go to their engineers and it would be a two week turn around before I got the machine back. So now I’m relegated back to my plain old Windows machine. I can live with that but I’m already missing my Mac, its gonna be a long two weeks!