[PB] OT: iBook issues solved

[Jim Freeman]

I thought I would share my success story.

My wife has been having problems with her dual USB iBook for close to  
a year. It wouldn't sleep when she closed the lid. The only way to  
get it to sleep was to manually put it to sleep through the power  
button or apple menu command. I've posted this problem to various  
lists and tried a bunch of things like resetting power manager and  
running disk utilities. Then a couple of weeks ago she started having  
crashes. And finally the trackpad started malfunctioning. You could  
move the pointer, but you couldn't click on anything. Otherwise the  
keyboard worked fine so you could use keyboard workarounds, but life  
is a pain in the butt without a mouse. I tried logging in to another  
user and then the pointer was stuck dragging whatever it was  
positioned over. If it was over a window you would drag that window  
around when you fingered the trackpad, but couldn't release or click  
on anything else. Again I tried a bunch of troubleshooting things  
with no success.

We were on the verge of buying a new computer (or at least buying an  
external mouse), when I decided to remove the 3rd party ram card I  
had installed years ago when she bought the computer. Bingo. All  
problems solved. We threw out the 128mb card and put in a 512 card.  
Now things are a lot faster (Tiger) and the iBook even sleeps,  
something it hasn't done in over a year. I still think she needs a  
new computer, but at least now she has a *choice*.

I know checking for bad ram is standard troubleshooting procedure. I  
even had problems with my Pismo years ago that were a result of bad  
ram. I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner.

Jim