I received my refirb Dual 2G G5 (PCI-X) AND my Dell 2405 24″ LCD display on Friday…just as I was heading to work. So it wasn’t until Saturday that I was able to get them up and running. When I first started the G5 I noticed that it was running Panther, but Apple included a copy of Tiger, so I was well pleased. While just poking around, the machine froze. I took this in stride. Shipping can cause all kinds of things to happen, so I happily pulled out the Tiger install disk and reformatted the drive, and installed a fresh copy of Tiger…and ran all the updates.

It is amazing. Dashboard is cool, I love the ability of Spotlight to be able to find words in files that I types, and then Garage Band…oh, wait, I forgot to install iLife. OK…I popped in the disk and ran the install. After 5 min, the machine froze. I was forced to shut it down via the power button (holding it for 5 seconds) and then restarting. But the computer didn’t chime when it came on…and nothing appeared on the screen. I shut it down again…counted to 10, and restarted. Half a chime then it cut out…nothing on the monitor. Hmmm. I shut down for 5 min then restarted, and it booted normally.

But, when I was installing Photoshop…it froze. Then the restart wouldn’t work again until I let it rest 5 min. So the machine was useless. I waited until Monday when I called Apple and ran thru their list of things to do. It was determined that it required service (I knew that…I was an Apple tech support specialist for a year…10 years ago, but I was one) so I drove it to my local authorized Apple repair center and handed it over. The same place I took my G4 when it arrived and…didn’t work.

Hmmmm….twice now I have received a computer from Apple that didn’t work. The first one was my Dual 1.25G G4. it turned out that one of the processors was bad. I would get a kernal panic anything I tried to do anyting…even open a window. Now my G5 is acting up. And my iBook suffered from that bad logicboard issue and has been sent to Apple three times to be repaired. Not a good track record…