Don't Panic

I have made no progress with my Python skills and for once I have a good excuse. My trusty Mac is playing games with me. I am suffering with  frequent Kernel Panics. Now this may sound like an outbreak of lunacy, but it is a serious issue for me. Every now and then, my screen has a transparent grey veil drawn down over it and a message appears telling me to restart. The restart takes a long time and within a short period of time, the same thing happens again.  I think, but do not know, that the problem is a dying hard drive. So yesterday I went out and bought a replacement and googled the procedure for the operation. It looked simple enough and I have dismantled previous machines, and replaced parts, with success.  So I took the plunger and removed the glass screen, undid the weird starhead screws and looked inside. Alas, the guts of my machine look nothing like the guts of the one on google and the hard drive is nowhere near as accessible. Caution is the keyword when fiddling , and so I reassembled the machine and decided to tackle the problem in the morning.
This morning, before the operation, I thought I'd power up one more time, just to get the full details of the panic report. I had a mind to print it out for reference purposes, but then remembered that my printer is out of ink.  So I left the machine running, waiting for it to panic; it still hasn't, though like the old golfing joke concerning gotchers, I wait for it to happen and cannot really settle to doing anything. I have cleaned the house, made soup, made a curry, cut the grass, and still the attack hasn't happened. While this goes on, I cannot even power up my Pi, let alone focus on the intricacies of language learning.