As I was talking to the guy at The Chip Merchant, we both said that Apple (and the Apple store) immediately say that bad third party RAM is to blame. While it is quite easy to blame RAM, it is such a cop out. For awhile now, my PowerBook’s DVD drive has been flakey, probably due to dust on the lens. However, I’ve needed the machine all the time, so I never sent it in for repair. Now that I have a spare machine, I decided to clean off the PowerBook and reinstall the OS. Due to the flakey DVD drive, it took a lot of tries and attempts at blowing the dust out of the drive to get the computer to read the install DVD. So, I called up AppleCare to see about replacing the DVD drive. They had me do the usual BS steps of using Disk Utility to repair the disk and repair permissions and then zap the PRAM. Of course, I knew this wouldn’t help as I probably already cleaned out the crap for now. The next thing they asked was if I had extra RAM in the machine. As I’m not one to lie, I said yes, knowing full well that RAM was not the cause of this problem. The lady on the phone was nice enough to send out the repair box anyway and let me “test” the machine without the RAM to see if the problem persisted. Yeah, sure the problem is caused by faulty RAM that I’ve had in the machine for almost 2 years.

I’ll send the machine in for repair when I get the box as it is still covered under AppleCare and the DVD drive either needs to be replaced or cleaned. I realize that the support reps work from a script, but given the age of the machine (almost 2 years old), isn’t it quite possible that the drive needs a cleaning?