[G4] problem was OWC Mercury Extreme 1.4 GHz processor upgrade!

[Steve Goldstein]

For weeks and weeks, my Quicksilver 2002 has been behaving more and more bizarrely, and I have tried everything short of removing the OWC Mercury Extreme G4 at 1.4GHz processor upgrade card ( http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEG41314L2S/ ) because retrofitting with the old processor is a pretty intense and exacting job for somebody that has never even had to apply thermal paste (heat sink compound) before.  I had reported last week that bright green characters in a variety of fonts were replacing some of the characters on my screen, seemingly at random.  I tried all the font-curing tricks that I could (including the tips in the sidebar "Take out the Cache" in the most recent MacWorld), FontFinagler, and FontAgent Pro.  Nothing worked.  I retrofitted the original ATI Radeon 7500 video card that had come with the Mac, and still no improvement.  I tested memory (using Remember), and it was all OK.  I thought that Eudora had finally gone whacko on me, so I switched to Mail.app (VASTLY underpowered for large mail archives, sorry to say), and still I got the font corruption.  Also, the font corruption presaged a freeze-up.  And, kernel panics galore.  I could not watch Steve's Keynote at WWDC without a freeze-up. 

Last night I remembered that Apple Hardware Test 41.2.4 had shipped with my Quicksilver, so I ran it, and got all sorts of Errors on the "Logic Board": scc_/3/7, scc_/1/5, post /16/64, all of which point to the Logic Board (these codes are supposedly Apple Confidential, but I was able to find them on the net). 

So, finally,  I bit the bullet this morning, and carefully laid out my Mac's innards on a spacious table and carefully removed the Mercury Extreme and replaced the 800 MHz processor that came with the Mac (and I got to use thermal paste on the heat sink-CPU interface for the first time--big letdown, an anti-climax, really). 

BINGO!  That was the problem all along.  Back in its original state, except that I re-installed the ATI Radeon 9000 video card, the Mac passes all tests with Apple Hardware Test, and, more importantly, seems to be behaving perfectly once again!  All of the utilities that I had suspected as culprits are working just fine, as is Eudora. 

I have to get the sales order number from the folks that purchased the processor upgrade for me and then contact MacSales (OWC), but I don't think that I want to risk re-installing a replacement, and I wonder if there is any way that we can get our money back.  Anybody have experiences to share in this regard?

By the way, in the middle of all this testing, the main cooling fan, that is located just under the power supply, broke down.  it is a cheap piece of junk in that the fan blade assembly is a single piece of plastic whose hub just press-fits onto the metal wafer that is the rotor.  The hub is much like a plastic bottle cap with rounded edges.  It was full of stress cracks, and the fan blade assembly dislodged itself from the rotor as it spun up and scraped up against the metal fan cage, making a hell of a racket. So, I also had to visit Radio Shack and get a replacement fan and splice on the connector from the original fan.  I'm getting to know the insides of this Mac better than I had ever desired to do!

Peace,

Steve