Twice in one day!?
I’m trying to make more time for this whole thing – blogging and web-design – so as if one update wasn’t enough today, I’m going for two.
I know a while back I had mentioned that my desktop was breaking, and I had suspected it was the hard drive going. The problem my hackintosh was having was kernel panics shortly after bootup, sometimes within seconds and other times within an hour or so. I originally thought it was the hard drive because everything else seemed to be working fine, and I kept blowing the power up at school, causing the computer to turn on and off several times in only a few minutes. However, after replacing the hard drive, and doing a clean install of iPC, I was still unable to have a stable system under OS X. I decided to format the new hard drive and throw Ubuntu 10.04 on there, as I had been able to run the live cd for hours at a time with no glitches. Ubuntu was been running for about 6 weeks, when I noticed that my computer would not come back from sleep. As odd as it seemed, I just restarted it the few times this happened, and all seemed well again. This past weekend, the same thing happened. I restarted it, and loaded up firefox, only to have my screen go black after clicking a link. Hmmmm – thats not supposed to happen. I restarted it again, only to have the process repeat. Finally, a light went off – for the past 6 months or so, my graphics card has been failing, and I was completely oblivious to it. After doing a quick google search for hackintosh compatible cards (this was my hackintosh desktop to begin with after all), I hopped in the car and headed to Micro Center to pick up a new PNY GeForce 9800 GT with 1 GB of DDR3 on-board. After swapping out my old Radeon HD2600XT (I think thats what was in it), I was able to fire up Ubuntu with no problems. I even was able to recover from my previous iPC install, and only had to load a new kernel extension (kext) for the 9800 GT to achieve full resolution and dual DVI monitor support right away. In fact, this post is being written in OS X with no problems at all.
So, moral of the story is check every component possible before dismissing a problem is incurable. I had convinced myself that OS X on my desktop was a fun stunt while it lasted, and it was time to come back to reality and use operating systems that were designed for it, instead of hacking things onto it. Thankfully, that isn’t how this is ending and my computer is back up and running better than ever.