Involuntary Reboot Log #25

Like I said the other day, looks like this iMac is dying. This time the machine simply turned itself off when I bumped the desk with my knee; it could barely even be called a bump.

The average time between failures is dropping. Not long ago it was about one month, but now it’s approaching three weeks, and if you look at the average over the last month the failures have been almost weekly.

Apart from the risk of damage to my data, I am starting to get sick of these Disk First Aid runs (during which the machine is unusable), which go especially slowly because Spotlight decides to reindex all of my volumes every time I have one of these failures.

On a tangential note: I received an email in response to my last post in which I complained about the lack of RAM in the low-end iMacs. It was pointed out to me that real-world RAM really is cheap nowadays (even if RAM from Apple is not). You can max out an iMac to 4 GB for a mere $100 at my retailer of choice (OWC), and for someone like me living in Europe and buying the RAM from the US you’re still looking at only 85€ including international shipping.

Involuntary reboot stats to date

  • Operating system version: 10.5.1
  • Kernel panics: 7
  • Hard resets: 18
  • Total failures: 25
  • Start of recording keeping: 21 May 2006
  • Total days to date: 617 days
  • Average time between failures: 24.68 days
  • Uptime at moment of failure(s): a day or so