Dead Titanium/500

[Kynan Shook]

If the battery is bad but it's still plugged in, it should still boot.  
You could always try removing the battery and run it off AC alone, but 
it shouldn't make a difference.  My best guess would be to reset the 
power manager.  On that model, turn it off (press the caps lock key and 
make sure it doesn't light up; if it does, hold down the power button 
until it turns off, that's how you know when the computer is totally 
off).  Find the little reset button on the back of the computer, near 
the modem port IIRC.  Press it briefly once, and make sure it doesn't 
get caught on the edge of the case when you release it.  Wait five 
seconds, press the power button.  See if that makes a difference.  Just 
out of curiosity, you might want to check both before and after whether 
the caps lock light comes on after pressing the power button.
Anyway, if that doesn't do it, you might want to try a few different 
things; first, check the RAM; if you have two sticks, try pulling one 
at a time out.  If you don't, well, we'll just assume it's good.  Next, 
tighten the Torx-8 screws on either side of the RAM slot, and any other 
T8s that are accessible from the top.  I've seen a few problems caused 
by those screws being loose, causing a short or something like that.
After you've tried that, you're probably getting into the territory of 
a more serious repair.  Call Apple to send it in, if it's worth about 
$400 to you.

On a side note, the AASP I work for had an interesting case once.  A 
woman purchased a Titanium to replace her old PowerBook 190, tried it 
for about a day, and decided she liked her old PowerBook better.  So, 
she put the Titanium on a shelf, and left it there, for a little over a 
year.  Well, one day, her 190 died, just wouldn't work at all.  So she 
grabs the Titanium and, lo and behold, it's dead too.  She brought it 
in, and decided not to pay for a new logic board (which is fairly 
expensive).  Moral of the story: Use it or lose it!  ;-)  Or, at least, 
if you're gonna buy a nice computer, give it to me for a few years 
until you decide you actually *want* to use it.  I'd like a G5 right 
now, if anybody's got a spare.  Dual 2 GHz, if you please.  I'd like to 
play around with OS X Server, and my spare computer (a 12" PowerBook) 
probably isn't the best thing to run it on.  If you don't have a G5, 
I'd also take an Xserve G5 and Xserve RAID in its place.  Mmmm, yummy.  
Compute power that I will never ever need...

...until Microsoft comes out with Office 2010, which will probably need 
a small cluster of computers for the CPU power it needs, and a disk 
array to hold the whole thing.

Jane <cbirds at earthlink.net> writes
> I have here a Ti/500 that has not been used in a while. I have the new
> square power supply but it has not been able to boot the thing.
> Hopefully eventually it will. But what if it won't? Does this mean I
> will have to replace the battery? The person did not use it for more
> than a year... the light is still yellow.