Breakage Day

Its been a day for breakages today. Firstly last night my PowerBook began to slow down and when I did I system profile only half of its memory was registering. After testing the individual memory modules successfully I put the RAM back into the machine and everything came back up as normal. I was hoping the problem was solved but then this morning the laptop froze with what looked like a kernel panic.
After rebooting only half the memory was visible again which was a sign of definite motherboard problems. Fortunately I had invested in a 3-year AppleCare protection plan when I bought the machine so it was just a case of backing everything up and taking it down the road to the local Apple Centre.

Apparently its going to take two days before it will be even looked at and probably another two or three whilst they find out what the problem is. I already know what the problem is and the following link just confirms my suspicions. Hopefully they fix this issue up and don't try to sticky tape the thing back to me and run.
What complicates matters is my complex installation (dual boot OSX/Ubuntu) which I think in Wellington is pretty rare. The poor young technician looked slightly dazed when I explained the setup so I am hoping he does not try to pin the obvious hardware failure on software.

Then one of my clients mysteriously lost their web browsing abilities from behind a ClarkConnect gateway. After testing everything for ages at the server and on the different desktops I was out of ideas (except for the fact that perhaps the ISP had screwed up). A phone call to the ISP revealed they were having some weird issues and sure enough an hour or two later everything was back to normal. An email from the ISP would have been really nice but I guess its asking too much for the big telecommunications companies to admit when they are wrong.

So I am stuck using my dual G5 PowerMac for software development for the next week (poor me). Its a bit of a shock to the machine as its primary use at the moment is for my girlfriend's Sims 2 addiction. The real drag is setting all my development specific software (Eclipse, Tomcat, OpenLDAP, MySQL) on this computer as each of these takes tweaking and testing and after all the lost hours today that's the last thing I feel like doing.

UPDATE: I have just received a call from the local Apple support center to say they have ordered a new logic board for the PowerBook and hopefully by early next week it will have arrived and be installed ready for me to pick up. I am glad it did not take two days for the laptop to be looked at as the technician had initially told me.