On Saturday, December 14, 2002, at 10:18 AM, Dennis B. Swaney wrote: > Jeremy, if I understand what you are saying here, Apple seems to have > built in a "expiration date" for their machines. Even if this was > unintentional, Apple should fix the computers as a warranty repair > (and good customer service) since the failure was a direct result of > Apple using "defective" EEPROMS and the Apple firmware updates. If, as > you say, " EEPROMs, unfortunately, can only be erased and re-written a > set number of times (usually somewhere between a few dozen times to a > few hundred depending on type)", Apple should have used EEPROMS that > have a high re-write rating, since they can't tell how many firmware > updates they will be issuing over the years ahead. > > Here is a question: will the firmware update work on a new empty > EEPROM? If so, then it seems that putting in a new EEPROM would be the > way to go, unless the EEPROM alone costs more than a new logic board.
I don't know if I'd call this a "defective" EEPROM. That's just the way life is with ALL EEPROMs, and I don't know that I'd go along with the "Apple should..." argument. What I've stated is a hypothesis based years of experience -- for all I know, it could be caused by something entirely unrelated like Mars being in retrograde while Jupiter is in Gemini. I've also seen the same behavior out of a machine what had the wrong firmware update run on it (the updater SHOULD catch this, but It Happens), or when someone turned off the computer in the middle of a firmware update (either intentionally, or because of a power outage), or because they'd modified the logic board. I've even seen one where someone used the PMU reset on a powerbook to restart their computer every time it froze. The PMU Reset works on the same principal and, over a couple of years, she had hit that button countless hundreds of times. Eventually, her PMU was rendered Dead, and her computer wouldn't boot. The CUDA switch is essentially the same, and if you're in the practice of resetting your iMac's CUDA frequently (some people treat the CUDA as a cure-all and hit it any time they have even the slightest hiccup) you can cause the same thing. Filling an empty EEPROM without having a bootable system requires special hardware, but is possible. If you're an electrical engineer, you probably have this equipment; otherwise, it's prohibitively expensive. In the example I gave, someone took an already filled EEPROM off of an otherwise dead logic board and soldered it onto the one with the dead EEPROM. -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
