Playing my own Devil’s Advocate (since I seem to like thinking amateurs should be empowered as much as possible at all turns), I feel I should pass along a little object lesson.

For about six months my laptop has been acting weird. As in: working fine, but now and then going haywire. An application will “unexpectedly quit”, and then within a few minutes all the applications will “unexpectedly quit”, including the OS.

Sometime in the first week of trying to fix it, I discovered that if as soon as the first application disappeared I restarted the computer and ran fsck (you don’t know what it is? That’s OK. A fixy thing you do for Unix machines like Macintoshes.), it would be better and I could get another 3 to 6 hours of use from it before having to do that again. Meanwhile I zeroed the drive, and reinstalled a pristine Tiger install, and ran TechTool Pro, and checked all the apps, and ran a bunch of third-party utilities that look at low-level hardware and software stuff, and avoided doing anything too important or time-consumig like upgrading all my apps and keeping the OS up to date and so forth. And I backed up. A lot.

Months. Because I knew I could fix it myself. The last straw was buying a $100 piece of super-extra-powerful disk-checky and -fixy software and running it… and having nothing wrong show up.

So I caved. I called AppleCare.

Two minutes into my description (”…and it seems to be whenever lots of pages of memory are getting swapped in and out, because it tends to happen when there are a lot of concurrent threads running and there are large files being displayed and there are large arrays being manipulated and stuff….”) the nice girl on the other end interrupted and asked, “Have you checked you RAM?”

Hunh?

“You know: booted into Open Firmware and checked your RAM with the Apple Hardware Test utility? Like it says in the little 64-page booklet that came with your computer, in the Troubleshooting section?”

Ahh. No, see, we’ve had Macintoshes in the house since 1985. We have six working machines in the house now, and a couple of doorstops in the garage. We know all about all the stuff that can go bad. We read macfixit, and I know how to zap PRAM and run fsck and–

“No, you should check your RAM. It sounds like a RAM problem.”

Hmmph. Well, I suppose if you think so. That’s a lot like, “Did you turn it off and back on again?” though, don’t you think?

“Tell you what. I’ll open a case number for you, and you take a few minutes while the email is coming to run the utility like it says in the little book.”

Well, OK.

Utility: BAD RAM.

Today, 37 hours later: 1 GB of new RAM installed, the thing is noticeably faster, everything’s great and happy, and I’m updating all my junk.

My way: about 25 weeks. Her way: about 7 minutes.

Think about that next time you hesitate to call support.