Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / August 2006

Well, presumably, the ticking clock/keyboard/mouse freeze can be brought
in while frozen. It's not necessarily reproducible, but there's clearly
a problem there. Depending on what applications you run, and what
hardware you've added/changed, it's easier or harder to isolate, but a
methodical approach will probably isolate it to some hardware component
or other. You wouldn't even have to do all the work yourself, so long as
you can rule out software interactions (which may not be trivial, but
there you are).

Again, swapping RAM is probably the first thing to try, since RAM
problems are often difficult to reproduce, can give symptoms similar to
yours, and cannot be reliably detected by common scanning software. I've
heard of the occasional machine that has bad RAM from Apple, but that's
not very common at all. Bad/finicky RAM from 3rd-party vendors is much
more common, particularly if you don't buy the (often rather more
expensive) RAM sold particularly for Apple computers. Apple's hardware
is known to be intolerant of RAM that doesn't _quite_ match the specs,
even if it works fine in other machines (even other Macs!).

Providing us a list of 3rd-party software/hardware might also be
worthwhile, since it's possible that someone else has had a software
interaction.

As for the charger issue, yeah. Since it goes away when you unplug it
you're in a pretty tough spot there. I honestly don't know what to tell
you, other than "that's not normal." Have you tried swapping to a
different AC adapter? I doubt the problem is tied to the brick, but it's
easy to check if someone else you know uses a similar-enough machine.

Or see if you can convince the boss to let you work from the Apple store
for a week so that when it happens you can simply call the service tech
over. ;-)

Sorry I can't be more helpful.

About a year ago my then several months old PowerBook G4 started showing an
intermittent problem where the screen would suddenly have a large number of
bright green spots that would change as the image on the screen changed. On
the first visit to the Apple store it was suggested that the spots were the
result of a software problem. A complete reinstall of the operating system
was undertaken, but this didn't help. On the second visit to the Apple store
a different genius suggested that it might be a hardware problem. The
PowerBook was sent off for repair and was returned after almost the entire
innards were replaced. The spots never reappeared.