[Ti] Cautionary Story

[Frank Ettenberg]

Hello List,  Just wanted to relate that I am a Tit. g4 1.67ghz   
Powerbook owner.  I bought it on ebay and the original 'owner' sold  
it 'as is', without the original OSX disks.  In any event, I am also  
a self-taught Mac user, therefore VERY prone to making mistakes in  
using the pb & sussing out problems with this machine.  The powebook  
seemed to be having problems-but not really very serious ones- in  
early Dec during startup and in using certain applications, so I  
heeded some advice given here, such as getting info via Terminal.  I  
really didnt know what I was doing, so using a program like Terminal  
& AppleJack-for me- was a BIG mistake and perhaps led to the major  
system/hard disk malfunction that developed around Xmastime.  I could  
no longer get anything but an incomprehensible error message out of  
AppleJack-doing a command-s at startup-and the startup never got any  
further than the whirling circle on the grey screen.  I contacted a  
local technician and he said that the system malfunction was next to  
impossible for him to diagnose & he'd never before seen anything like  
it.  A mac friend of mine said that a previous user of this pb might  
have processed movies or videos & that process tends to really upset  
formatting of info on the disk.  The seller of this unit may or may  
not have done a clean install of the disk before selling it & the  
technician doubts that.  At any rate,  I appreciate the notion of  
info sharing, but, in effect, I as an amateur have little ability to  
understand what y'all are saying and recommending a large part of the  
time.  Just a note for everyone--this game can be very expensive, of  
course, especially for ignoramuses like me.  ( I paid  the tech about  
450 dollars to fix the problem--he recovered just about all my jpgs  
and other data, so at least I know I must regularly back everything  
up.) Anyhow, I now have a perfectly functioning pb since he formatted  
the disk-except that it slows down considerably when I've just  
started Limewire-and I have to replenish a lot of the software that  
was discarded in the clean/install that the tech wound up doing.