Brought it to Apple Genius Bar last night. Did all the tests, zapped the PRAM, suspected it was a negotiation thing between the 16GB RAM I installed a month ago and the HD. The only test that came up bad at Apple was the RAM test, but they told me even tho OWC specs that this machine, the 7,1 can use 16GB, it is not recommended.
Back in mid 2010 when your Powerbook was designed and tested the largest capacity 204 pin PC3-8500 SO-DIMMs available only had 4GB of RAM, thus Apple's recommendation of a maximum of 8GB. AFIK Apple never revisits those recommendations when newer larger capacity DIMMs are released, so the recommendation never changes. Apple's rationale is they do not want to recommend anything they have not thoroughly tested and they don't want to spend the money to go back and re-test every time a new higher capacity DIMM is released. In point of fact there are a whole lot of Macs out there running just fine with more RAM than Apple's original recommendation including two in this room. While your problem
may be RAM related I would take the Genius' comment with more than a grain of salt. It is worth noting that thorough RAM testing can take several hours to run and still may not find all the memory errors.
It sounds like you have covered all the bases with your network, but if you haven't done so then in this order…
- Shut down your Powerbook
- Shut down the network extender (pull the plug)
- Shut down the router creating the network
- shut down the modem
- Wait at least 30 seconds
- begin powering everything back up in the reverse order that you shut them down and allowing each device to come up fully and stabilize before going to the next device in the chain.
