It’s no secret that when I got my Powerbook there were a lot of people telling me it would break. Well it did. And now it’s fixed. In about five minutes, most of which involved me not being aware that it was broken.
For a few minutes there my old LappyG4 was refusing to boot, giving me the message that I needed to reboot or power off (in several languages). So I did. And it continued to refuse to boot. A short Web search later I discovered that that particular message is associated with a kernel panic, which you would be right to assume is not a good thing for a kernel to do.
This is the bit of the story which, if I was using Windows or Linux, would take up a good chunk of the rest of the page to tell. The bit where I describe how I fixed it. As it happens, it’s quite easy to describe. I held the shift key down for a moment during the boot process. This sent OSX into safe mode, wherein it automatically ran a disk repair utility. Then I rebooted.
From kernel panic to perfect working order in a single keystroke. That’s why they cost a little more than a Dell.