After nearly five brutal years of service… it looks like my trusty ol’ PPC 20″ iMac G5 has kicked the bucket. I took it into the Apple Store after it failed to boot several times in a row. It would power on, but wouldn’t ‘chime’, and would rest on a dark gray screen to no avail. It turns out that iMacs have a recurring issue with capacitor caps on the logic board bulging and/or bursting – causing the board to fail.

I have a strong sentimental attachment to this machine – because I edited Slide America in its entirety on it. I worked this machine harder than I’ve worked any other computer – it definitely had a GREAT run.When I took this machine in, I also took two other 17″ iMacs that David Adams kindly gave me during his office’s liquidation of old computers. They wouldn’t boot either. What I find VERY strange – is that both of these machines had the exact same issue. What are the odds that 3/3 iMacs that I have failed because of the same faulty capacitors?

I did some research, and may try and buy new caps and replace all the old ones – seeing as a new logic board will end up running me the cost of a new machine after parts and labor. This is the first hardware issue I have had with Apple computers in my career. Hopefully… it will be the last.

I was curious to see what kind of results I would get if I strapped my iPhone in the e46 and recorded a run using Dynolicious’ skidpad mode. The data is pretty interesting. I was surprised the lateral numbers weren’t higher. I suppose if I strapped the phone in the trunk that it would read differently. It is odd that the braking number is so high, because I don’t use the brakes… ever. I also found it interesting that the car pulled just shy of 1.0 G on accel.rnrnrnOverall… I think this app is great. The timed run feature is very interesting, and extremely fun to use. More on that soon.

I have 1 iMac G5 & 3 MacBook Pro’s cranking out all the final renders and video compression for Slide America. The DVD Authoring is complete… I’m just waiting on everything to be compressed MPG2 so I can rip the master.Every computer in this room has the processors burning at full-speed… all with the fans on high. It is extremely loud, and definitely a good 20 degrees hotter in this room right now.