[Ti] Cautionary Story

[Dr. Trevor J. Hutley]

On 9 Jan 2007, at 13:24, Frank Ettenberg wrote:

> 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.

Frank - probably most of us on the list are amateurs (i know some are  
not), but with experience, and we heave learnt lessons the hard way.

I think the lesson from your story is "if you buy or get a Powerbook  
from somewhere else, reformat the disk and reinstall the latest OS,  
before you do anything else".

That would not cost you more than $100, or zero if you had the OS  
disks already.


regards,  Trevor