Thursday, November 6th, 2014

	Ghosts in PowerBook
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In April 2013 I've got a PowerBook G3 Kanga. I like this computer,
even though I have other PowerBooks which are far less bulky and 
heavy. But this machine was the first machine with PowerPC G3 CPU
and as such it was the fastest notebook in the world when released.

The problem is, that it seems to be cursed. I was running Rhapsody
on it and everything was working flawlessly. Then I installed Czech 
Mac OS 8.1 and since then I'm getting random error messages, which
are really weird. The most frequent one can be translated as
"Cache memory error, contact technical support." One of the others
is "Incorrect instruction, cannot boot operating system."

I removed the 128MB RAM module, now errors are less frequent, but
they still appear time from time. Tools like TattleTech report CPU 
cache to be disabled, machine seems to be a bit sluggish when running
68k code, which both can mean two things: either the CPU cache is 
corrupted or Mac OS has some problems working with it. I don't know
whether G3 can turn its L2 cache off and I don't know whether OS 8.1
is a good choice for this machine. Sadly no one around here has this
machine, so I have to find out myself.

But as "kanga" really means "cursed" in Maori, maybe an exorcist
would be better solution.

.