[Ti] Flaky powerbook

[Chris Olson]

On Oct 28, 2003, at 11:50 AM, nick weldin wrote:

> I've just been trying to sort a some friends powerbook. They mentioned 
> in passing that they didn't really use it as it kept turining itself 
> off (in the middle of doing stuff) as well as crashing alot.
>
> Its a 15inch dvi with superdrive
>
> I managed to get it to boot up a couple of times (in 9.2) then into 10.
> Booted diskwarrior disk, it reported problem with the disc wrapper and 
> fixed it - half way through the rest of its work froze, restarted and 
> tried again, froze again. Managed to get it to restart from disk, but 
> question mark folder for a sec or two, so ran System Profiler to see 
> what showed up - first screen showed something along the lines of -  
> startup disc identifed but not able to say which ATA buss it is on, 
> and machine crashed.
>
> Put in the hardware test CD and it bugged out - came up with open 
> firmware dialogue box, but couldn't type anything in.
>
> Now the computer comes on, no chime and no screen light but the fan 
> starts.
> Have tried the pmu reset , but no joy. Hardware test CD is still in 
> the drive and won't come out!
>
> Any advice or is it time to take it to an Apple store.

Pull the keyboard and see what it has for RAM.  If it has two modules, 
try them one at a time.  My Ti 800 (1GB RAM) did something similar to 
that about six months ago.  It turned out to be one of the 512MB RAM 
modules that was flaky.  I put a new module in and it's been fine ever 
since.  If it only has one RAM module, you may as well take it to an 
AASP, since you'd have to buy another module to verify that it has bad 
RAM.

To get the CD out of the drive, take something rather small and pointy, 
like a pen filler, and poke it in on the right side of the drive bay.  
You'll feel a little button in there past the dust shield that'll 
manually eject the CD from the drive.  Power has to on to get it to 
eject.
--
Chris