Comatose iBook?

[Joe Sporleder]

We have an iBook that one of our editor/sales person uses, I'll call it 
an "ice" colored one, 500mhz, USB & FireWire, 10GB HD, CD-ROM, and I 
believe it has 320MB of RAM. They had been running it on MacOS 9.2.2 in 
a small newspaper environment just fine (although it shipped with 
10.1.4, we just were not ready for MacOS X). Today, it developed a 
problem that on start up, it would get just to where it'd draw the 
Finder desktop on the screen, and then go to sleep. Starting up from 
any CD (restore or System software, MacOS 9.2.2. or MacOS X 10.1.4 CDs 
that came with it), it'd go to sleep within a minute or 2 after 
starting up. I found a couple of KBase articles at Apple.com's support 
site and had the location where the ibook was to follow the articles 
instructions. Zapping the PRAM and following the instructions for that 
particular iBook to reset the Power Management proved unsuccessful. I 
will have access to the iBook later and will try again myself to see if 
I can get it running right. I was told that the  'book was dropped 
flatly on its bottom, but that it had run just fine for 2 days after 
that, but I'm wondering if something affecting the power flow has come 
loose after its little "accident"?

Of course, it is about 6 months past its warranty, it was a refurb 
model that we bought from Small Dog, so we didn't pay very much for it, 
so we kind of figured if anything happened to it, we'd just replace it 
with another cheap refurb, depending on how much it'd cost to repair it.

Joe