Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / April 2005

My Pisma Powerbook has recently started a behavior that has me stumpted.
Here is the schtick. I connected a powered Firewire hub and a powered USB
hub.. I for years have used a power supply distributor that has plug
receptacles on the back and toggle switches on the front. It has five
receptacles. All my stuff is connected to one of the receptacles. The
Computer one takes the Pismo power block. Hard drives, scanners, cd
burners, video digitizer go onto the other receptacles via other power
strips. A hard drive, cd burner, and video digitizer connect via the
Firewire hub. A flatbed scanner, film scanner, compact flash receptacle,
and a Wacom tablet connect via the USB hub.
Everything is hunky-dory until shut down. No matter which way I shutdown
(from menu bar or by pressing power key) the Pismo shuts down just fine,
but when I switch off the power unit the Pismo proceeds to boot using its
battery for power. The one thing that stopped this behavior was to
disconnect the two powered hubs.  I think the Firewire hub was
responsible, but cannot figure why. This behavior is the same whether I am
shutting down from OS 9.2.2 or OS 10.3.9 Panther.
Does anyone have a glimmer of an idea why for this behavior.
I brought this up at a Mac UG and was told that they deal with OS software
problems and not power supply problems. Which didn't enlighten one single
bit.
My email address is ferma001@umn.edu, if you wish to reply off-line. Thank you.