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Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / November 2005PowerBook 15" - strange problems
PowerBook15, 1.67, 1gb, 10.4.2 Left to sleep, when woken it's twice gone to a blue screen, and remained there. Mouse works. Rebooting doesn't help - it just goes to the blue screen at the end of the booting sequence, before the desktop loads. As I say, this has happened twice; each time rebooting holding down the shift key - and then rebooting again - restored things. But yesterday it had a totally black screen, not a blue one; but, after repeated reboots, normal service was resumed... Today the screen had automatically reset brightness to zero, and the 'brighter' key didn't work. It took much squinting and prayer before I could activate Preferences, and reset the brightness... Any ideas as to what's happening? The machine is still under warranty, but, as it's now working perfectly it's hard to see what I can ask AppleCare! - duncan > PowerBook15, 1.67, 1gb, 10.4.2 > Any ideas as to what's happening? The machine is still under warranty, but, > as it's now working perfectly it's hard to see what I can ask AppleCare! Well if you feel adventurous you could reload Mac OS X and see if it goes away... Other than that it is totall a crap shoot as to what is causing it... > PowerBook15, 1.67, 1gb, 10.4.2 > [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > > - duncan Try resetting the PMU. The procedure is different for different PBs. If you go to Apple support and put "reset PMU" in the search box, you'll get an article explaining how to reset all models. Cathy  Signature"there's a dance or two in the old dame yet." - mehitabel C.Stevenson, M.D. cats1921@invalidsonic.net > PowerBook15, 1.67, 1gb, 10.4.2 > [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > Any ideas as to what's happening? The machine is still under warranty, but, > as it's now working perfectly it's hard to see what I can ask AppleCare! If I were you, I would report this to Apple as soon as possible. Just explain to Apple exactly what you wrote in your article. That way, you preserve your right to get the problem fixed, even if the problem happens again outside the warranty period. > > PowerBook15, 1.67, 1gb, 10.4.2 > > [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > preserve your right to get the problem fixed, even if the problem > happens again outside the warranty period. I did this; they talked me through a heap of changes/reboots, and at the end it worked exactly as it had at the beginning - and after checking, they said they had had no other reports of naything similar! Since then - about 10 days ago - it's only happened once... Interestingly, when the brightness key is operational, all is well; but if it isn't, then a crash seems to follow... not immedaitely, but soon. I'm stumped; but as the PB works brilliantly almost all the time, I guess I'm stuck! - duncan > > > PowerBook15, 1.67, 1gb, 10.4.2 > > > [quoted text clipped - 27 lines] > > - duncan Did you install any aftermarket RAM? It's even possible (but rather less likely) that the stock RAM is slightly wonky. The only reliable way to test this is to remove/swap RAM. If the problem goes away, the RAM that you removed is defective and should be replaced (most places will replace RAM for shipping, once purchased). You might also see whether the problem recurs after updating to 10.4.3. HTH SignatureLater, John johajohn@indianahoosiers.edu 'indiana' is a 'nolnn' and 'hoosier' is a 'solkk'. Indiana doesn't solkk. > Did you install any aftermarket RAM? It's even possible (but rather less > likely) that the stock RAM is slightly wonky. The only reliable way to [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > > You might also see whether the problem recurs after updating to 10.4.3. Just the standard vanilla Apple-installed RAM; but since running 10.4.3 it hasn't happened.... I guess that if it happens again - and gets too frequent - I'll have to take it to the nearest Apple dealer, and ask them to play with the RAM... sigh. Thanks for the info., though! - duncan >I guess that if it happens again - and gets too frequent - I'll have to >take it to the nearest Apple dealer, and ask them to play with the RAM... >sigh. Last spring I bought a G4 upgrade for my PowerMac G4. It had a bad cache on it and would frequently kernel panic after going to sleep. Turning the cache off before sleep and back on after it helped, but did not completely fix the problem. I had a system all set up to do the cache disabling before and after sleep, but in the end I had to return the card and get a new CPU. The new processor has worked flawlessly. Detecting a slightly flaky processor cache can be really difficult. Trying to get work done on a machine like that is downright risky. I was lucky in that putting the machine to sleep with caches enabled almost always allowed me to reproduce the kernel panic in under ten minutes, (usually about 2-5 minutes) so I knew there was a problem. For some reason, sleeping with caches enabled made the crash occur about 100 times more quickly. My usual test was to boot up, put the machine to sleep, launch iTunes and make it play my web radio station. When the sound started looping, I knew the machine had crashed and I could check the time from the frozen iTunes display. SignatureJuri Munkki - http://www.iki.fi/jmunkki - Windsurfing: Faster than the wind. |
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