Thank you, Drew & Dan in particular for all the helpful commentaries on the merits of various OS's and demerits of VM. Alas I don't have 9.1 available, but do have the 8.6 upgrade and was (before last night, see below) on the verge of installing it just to see if it would help, as a clean reinstall of 8.5 most emphatically has *not*. The main issue with this 5300 is neither memory (32MB, with VM set to add one extra for the sake of efficiency, is adequate for Word 5.1, collecting email when away from home, and occasional Photoshop 4, which is about all I ever use it for), nor speed (it's pretty sluggish, but then so am I), it is *stability*. It works perfectly for a while, then dreams up some new form of bizarre behavior to devil me with: half the apps "unexpectedly quit because of error type 3," Word refuses to run because "not enough memory" (when there's plenty), TechTools says the Finder flunks its tests (even immediately after the above-mentioned reinstall), etc.
The latest round of weirdness started last night, and includes some stuff I've never heard mentioned, on this list or elsewhere. I was typing away happily in Word (on the battery FWIW), when all of a sudden the machine started inserting a string of extra "n's" between the letters. On investigation it turned out that striking the actual letter n did nothing at all, hitting any other key might or might not produce that corresponding letter, but certainly would produce one or more n's. Then it started typing strings of n's all by itself, with no key struck at all. It saved OK, but like some demented copyeditor insisted on putting another n at the very end of the last sentence, then asked "save changes?" (the miserable n) when told to close -- and of course would not respond to the keyboard n as in "no" (actually by that time it was "no, goddamn it!" All right, at least it let me click no with the button, so I got out of Word, tried out Stickies, which refused to respond to a typed n but otherwise seemed unaffected, would have tried SimpleText but it wouldn't open (good old "error type 3" again). I then said forget it and shut the PB down. Now this morning it booted fine but as the desktop appeared went "pingpingpingping" maybe ten times. (For quite some time it's been producing a single ping when booting and coming back from sleep). A click in Stickies resulted in another chorus of pings, but the letter n seemed to behave normally. In Word, more pings, normal response from the keyboard for a few letters, then endless n's. What is going on with this machine??????? A virus maybe? A hardware problem? After several months on this list I've become convinced that at least one of you guys has been there and done that no matter what the that might be: so what about this that? Please -- I'm about to turn the 5300 into a doorstop before it sends me to the locked ward. TIA, Victoria -- PowerBooks is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Enter To Win A | -- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299 | Free iBook! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PowerBooks list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/powerbooks.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/powerbooks%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
