The cell phone call went something like this: “Sorry to bother you dear, but the big Mac’s screen just went dark, and now smoke is coming out of it. What should I do?” My advice (”unplug it”) may have saved more unfortunate damage to the computer, if not the household.
When I returned, the house was redolent with the distinctive odor of fried electronics. When plugged in, the Mac would only click – it showed no signs of trying to boot. A quick visit to that great Mac hardware site, Low End Mac revealed that my prized, liquid-cooled dual G5 had an F- reliability rating, with its motherboard and graphics card being particularly suspect (to be fair, this machine is about 5 years old and has been on continuously).
Linda, in the course of the last year, has pretty much taken over the dual G5, mainly for its 23-inch Apple Cinema display which allows her to keep email, browser, documents et al. open and visible at once. So, of course, her first words were, “How soon until I get my email back?”
On the one hand, I’d purchased a 500 GB hard drive (they’re cheap nowadays) and set Time Machine to back up the dual G5: on the other, both drives were installed in the same, still-smoking chassis. As it happens we have an older, 1.8 GHz G5 (main graphics workstation for the stalled Gulker Photo Archive). Some quick checks of printed and PDF manuals revealed that both machines featured SATA buses and, more importantly for Macs, the same drive mounting hardware. Short story, the drives were OK and it took about 2 hours to get Linda back up: now we’re thinking about the replacement machine…
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