Forums | MacLife

Hi all.

So I'm using my 12 inch PowerBook G4 (1.33MHz) which has been purring away almost 24/7 for 2 years or so. Business as usual, chatting to a friend on ICQ when bam, the screen goes black. The machine is still powered, but I can't seem to raise it in any way, it appears to have locked up. So I close the lid and it fails to sleep, (Apple logo still lit up). I open it back up and try the usual keyboard shortcut to shut it down with no luck. I try holding down the power button, also no luck. So I pull the power, flip it over, pull out the battery and let it sit for bit. I reconnect the power and try to boot with no success. There is no startup chime, just a few whirs and clicks and a black screen.

- I try resetting the PRAM, no joy.
- I try resetting the PMU, no joy.
- I reseat the third party RAM, nope.
- I remove the third party RAM, nope.
- I remove the Airport Extreme card, nope.
- I randomly try various keyboard combos that I know will be useless, but try anyway, nothing.
- I am stuck for ideas.

(I can't hold down C and boot off CD because the boot process doesn't even get that far. Later today I will try connecting via firewire to another Mac and booting up as a slave to see if I can get anything, but for now...)

:: Further, potentially useful infomation ::
- With the machine turned off, the battery charges correctly, showing a yellow light while charging and a green light when fully charged.
- Immediately upon turning the machine on, the colour of the charge light goes to green, even if the battery is not fully charged. Watching it for a while I notice that about every 7-8 seconds it flashes yellow very briefly.
- On startup the superdrive makes a few "I'm alive" clicks, the hard drive spins up and the fan spins away. Nothing else happens, no startup chime, nothing. After a short time, the hard drive gets bored and spins down.
- Pressing the caps key results in random results. Sometimes it toggles, sometimes not. Holding it down results in the caps light flashing very rapidly.
- num lock (F6) no longer works, however pressing F5 causes the F6 num lock light to toggle in a random manner (what the?). Holding it down causes the light to flash on and off in a steady manner.
- the only key combination that does anything at all is a PMU reset (which I don't like doing). No other combo that I've tried does anything at all.

My guess is that my logic board has eaten lead or I've got a corrupt PMU, but I don't really know. Having spent the last of my $$$'s buying XMAS presents for people who don't deserve them, I'd really, really like to avoid having to take my little 'out-of-warranty' Mac in for a service.

Does anyone have any ideas?
That flashing num lock has to mean something...

Cheers,

Jules in Perth, Western Australia

p.s. To the site monkeys.
Your javascript is causing an error in IE6 because it doesn't like variables being used in for loops without first being declared. Specifically, replace the line,

for (i = 0; i < the_form.length; ++i)

with

for (var i=0; i<the_form.length; i++)

Same thing when using a for(x in y) loop; x must be declared.

Last edited by Julian (2005-12-16 1:11 am)