THIS is why I'm always leery of upgrades. I felt I was finally ready to take the plunge and go from OS 9.1 to OS X on my cube at home. I waited for OS 10.2, which has been widely hailed as fabulous. I bought a new external 40gig hard drive to install it on, so that if something terrible happened my original drive would be unscathed. Then I learned that I needed to do a 'firmware update' before installing OS X. What exactly is firmware, anyway? Whatever it is, it is part of the startup process, and in performs a diagnostic on the computer RAM (memory). Well, guess what! My two 256meg RAM boards turned out to be 'out of spec' by the new stringent Apple standards. I went from 576 megs of RAM to 64 (the one board the cube came with). Suddenly I was barely able to boot up the system, much less run an app!

Needless to say, I was vexed. Fortunately, I had another 256 mb board from a different vendor that I had never gotten around to installing. The Cube likes that one. And after an initial phone call (requisite 1/2 hour on hold) it seems like ClubMac is going to replace the other boards, since they are technically defective. But still.