So, it started last night. I was busy playing the new Runic game that Pangea has published, and suddenly started smelling this…burning…from somewhere in the room. It’s gotten pretty warm around here, so at first I thought it was coming from outside, someone grilling or burning a fire. Then I could tell it was most definitely not that. Oh yeah, and my screen had started to display strange artifacts.

I shut the G5 down right quick.

I have spent the rest of yesterday evening and most of today (when I wasn’t hauling my kid’s butt to a birthday party) trying to figure out what the problem was. At first, I thought it might be my harddrive. That was due to my turning the machine on again last night after I opened up the side to see what I could see, and hearing the harddrive go, “whirr, whirr, whirr.” I shut it back down very quickly and decided that my next step would be a trip to Fry’s the next day to get a new harddrive.

Yippee! Fry’s had 300 GB SATA harddrives on sale for, like, $70. So I bought two, just in case (can never have enough storage). Brought em home and installed one, then attempted to install OS X on it. And got an error. Then I remembered that these suckers come as secondary drives, and you have to physically reconfigure them for primary. Only, I didn’t have any manual or info to remind me, because they were cheapo because they were OEM drives being sold. And I didn’t have the necessary components to adjust them. Great.

Meanwhile, hubby says he wants to hear this harddrive whirring. So I put the original one in, turn the machine on…and it boots up fine. Yeah, you knew that was going to happen. Only, now I hear the fans churning like a Boeing 747, and my graphics card, an ATI X800, whirring weird.

So, then I got to spend the rest of today doing huge amounts of research to try and find out why this is happening. And I find I get to join the throngs of *other* G5 users who *also* have problems with fans running out of control on their machines. And no one really knows why. Lovely.

What I’ve been able to narrow down, at least for my problem, is this. I think my problem has to do with the FCU (fan control unit). I think that whatever caused the smell may have shorted out the FCU in the drive bay fan (which is the fan it turns out is running out of control at 1000 rpm), or shorted out how the fan is controlled by the FCU.

I may decide to take the whole rig in tomorrow to the nearest Apple Repair center in the U District (if it’s open) and have them look it over.

I don’t feel like having my system take off for Maui (at least, not without me).

Unfortunately, it also means that the Game Review Edition that I was planning for Monday I won’t be able to get done. Ah well. This is a holiday, after all.