[X4U] Lesson Learned

[LA Licata]

Dear List,

in the spirit of holiday giving, I thought I would pass on a "lesson  
learned" so maybe, you will not have to suffer...

Last Monday, while I on a 5 day trip away from home, I was using my  
17" PB G4 (10.4.11) in the lobby of the hotel to get mail when some  
kids running bumped into the sofa I was on and my mac stopped working  
and came up with the black box with white letters, with the power  
button in the background, stating in some 4 languages that I needed  
to restart my computer. Uggggghhhhh. Never seen that box before. (It  
is NOT the kernel panic alert.)

I did, but that box appeared every time. Being away from home,  all I  
could do was put it away. My initial thought was the hard disc was  
scratched by the bumping....

Got home late late saturday night and started to work on the PB  
Sunday AM. Starting up from an external drive, (using the cmd-opt- 
shift-delete shortcut) got the machine up and running. Ran disk  
utilities, disk warrior, tech tools all multiple times and while I  
found some problems, none reached out and touched me as being the cause.

Restarted off of the internal hard drive and within minutes, the  
dreaded black box shows up.

Restarted off the external drive, and there is the box........

Shut down the PB, and removed the battery to reset NVRAM (?) per  
apple's tech note..... While the battery was out, I remembered from  
somewhere that if RAM is not firmly seated, the PB could act flaky.  
So, opened the ram cover and using a flashlight, looked at the ram.  
Seemed fine and tight....

Then I remembered that someone had said that everything could look  
fine, but it still might not be seated right.

So, after a few moments to think how to to remove these modules, I do  
take them out, and inspect the contacts. No problems noted, so I  
reinsert and restart reseting PRAM along way. (Could not be too  
cautious.)

To make a long story end soon, been running for 16+ hours without a  
problem......

So lesson learned: Back up frequently. ( I do weekly every Saturday  
night, and before every trip), Keep installation instructions when  
you buy something.

And, read lists like this one, because it was either on this list, or  
a list like this one, where someone talked about physically removing  
and reinserting ram to fix a flaky computer problem....

Happy Holidays.
Lee