Hi
I got a 1.67 GHz Aluminum Powerbook in February of 2005. It has been running 10.3.9 forever. I did throw in 160 GB hard drive (I replaced it following instructions) about 3 months ago. Some intermittent problems have emerged over the last 6-8 months. I am in the middle of a crunch project and mostly I get decent performance but I'm worried that something is slowly getting worse and I have to decide whether to interrupt work and call AppleCare and investigate of not.
Performance is intermittently slow, and as it turns out, the 512 MB RAM chip in the lower slot is intemittently not recognized when I check "About this Mac". So sometimes I am on 512 and sometimes on 1 GB.
USB is intemittently nonfunctional, a problem that repairs if I restart the machine.
More recently I have had the curious experience of occasionally (perhaps once every 3-8 days) having "negative images" on that little bar that runs across the top of the screen where the application scroll bars are accessed. When the "negative image" appears, I can't consistently access the scrollbars for that application. This peculiar phenom happens sometimes in the Finder or in some other applications (see picture)
There is not a particular increase in crashes since this started happening, but for about 6-10 months the computer has tended to crash while asleep.
So the question is (a) is this likely attributable to the RAM slot defect, which my computer might actually have?
The link for that RAM slot thing is
About the PowerBook G4 (15-inch 1.67/1.5GHz) Memory Slot Repair Extension Program
And (b) should I rush to send this thing in (and try to work off alternate computer for a few days, which is painful and challenging) or poke along until I get my current big project done in a few weeks?
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