I have good news and bad. Oh and need some help.

The Good:
The 20" iMac is on the way. In a slight of hand I will remove the PC my wife always uses and slip the iMac in its place. I hope to finally convert her over.

Now the Bad. I have a 12" powerbook G4 1.33. About a year and a half old. It gives me fits anytime I have to apply an update. I have reloaded the OS more times than I care to count. It has been running well until yesterday. I applied the lastest updates two days ago and did not have any issues. After the updates I ran YASU to repair permissions, etc. and rebooted. Well, now I get the spinning gear of death and it will not go past it. I have cleared PRAM, repaired permissions via OS X disk, ran fsck to repair the disk (although it was fine). This is the samething I have went throught 5 or 6 times. I really don't want to reload it again.

So, first do any of you have any ideas as to what I may try? I am waiting for the new iMac mentioned above to try and boot the PB in target disk mode via the iMac to see if there is anything I can do from it. Your suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Hmm... did you try bringing it to an apple genius bar? they might be able to help you.

Try taking out your ram module and see what happens with just the soldered on motherboard ram. Sometimes ram can cause this kind of unpredictability if there is just a rotten bit area in one of the chips somewhere. Of course this wouldn't help if the board ram was the culprit. Still worth the test just to see. Don't handle your ram module until you've grounded yourself on a water faucet or something metallic, then be sure to lay the module on something metallic while you're checking the computer.