R.I.P. PowerMac G5

Over the last two days, my dual 2GHz G5 saw the light, and entered into Mac Heaven. It's slow, downward spiral started about 2 years ago when we had a lightning strike knock out a lot of our electronics. Being the good owner that I am, I unplug all my computer gear any time a storm is imminent. What I forgot to unplug, however, was the ethernet cable. Unfortunately the lightning found the phone line outside and followed it in to the house, blowing almost every phone jack box in our house clear off the wall. It also cooked my DSL modem, and brand new Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. It followed the ethernet lines out of the base station to my laser printer (fried) and to my G5. The ethernet port hasn't worked since, but the rest of the computer appeared to be fine.

About a year later, I began having problems with my video card and a firewire port. Luckily I had a spare video card, so life continued on. Then last fall the G5 was crashing randomly, and almost every time I restarted it. I thought it was bad RAM, as System Profiler was reporting back 3GB, when there was 4GB installed. After getting replacement warranty RAM, the problem persisted. Since Christmas though, I haven't had any problems with it... until Monday.

It was crashing left and right Monday, making for a miserable day. I tried swapping RAM around, trying different slots and different combinations. A couple times it seemed like it worked, but no more than 10 minutes later... hang. Reboot, hang. And so on.

So after two days of frustration as my poor G5 sputtered towards the end of it's usable life, I decided to put it out of it's misery, taking it off life support, and pulled it's plug.

----^v----^v----^v---------------------- (long beep)

How will I ever recover? I think the new 27" iMac (the i7 version with 8GB RAM & 2TB hard drive) I ordered last night will help the pain subside. I'll let you know next week when it arrives.