Macbook Serious Power Issues!

M

macattack600

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So I got this macbook from a friend said it was stuck in recovery mode well I brought it home and stuck a good hd in and booted it up seem like everything was fine. I noticed the sleep light did'nt come on but still made noize from the dvd drive and chime. I did a smc reset popped the battery back in and connected the power cable, and guess what the power adapter was dead it is a fairly new one I use all the time on a good macbook. So I waited a bit disconnected the battery and after a few tries on the magsafe it went green. I powerd up (no white light on ) and into the os fine. Is the sleep light broke ? how does this effect the mac as whole if it is simply out, maybe there is a serious power issue with it?. By the way I stuck that questionable battery in my good macbook and caused the same issue (which is going in the trash). My good macbook is working fine with the original battery by the way. The original charger with the power issued macbook was frayed a bit . Well I'm trying to find out with the sleep light not working what kind of issues can it cause, I can put the lid down and it will sleep but when I lift it up sometimes I have to press the spacebar to wake it up. Any ideas on this stuff?
 
The Sleep LED is not too important, if you can be sure that your MacBook really does go to sleep - that is, when asleep, the fan and hard drive shut off, and the display shuts off. That would be most important when closing the lid. You don't want your MacBook to wake up (turning on the screen) while the lid is closed, because of heat problems.
The sleep LED connects into a tiny plug in the hard drive connector board. It's a little tricky to reconnect if that hard drive connector has ever been replaced. Another possibility is a liquid spill into that area.
If your MacBook is otherwise working OK, then the sleep LED doesn't really need to work. The newest MacBooks don't even have that LED.

I suggest that you make sure the charging circuit is working. Disconnect a good power adapter, and use your good battery - let the battery discharge to below 95%. Plug in the adapter - the LED on the connector should be green for a few seconds (indicating power), then change to amber/orange, which indicates charging. The battery icon in the menubar should also change to a lightning bolt, again indicating charging in progress.
 
ok check this out. on one occasion I had the battery out and the charger unplugged , plugged it back in hit the power button guess what! the screen instantly turned on and was at the mac os screen I have password log in on the HD too whoa! then it was faint white with the desktop still in the background. I noticed a 7 dot at the bottom it when through a sequence of filling the dots in , kinda like the volume does on the desktop screen when you increase it . I've never seen that before then when it fully loaded it went to regular desktop color and normal operation. Also there is a typical one inch chip on the keyboard above the sleep light led I'm thinking the led is damaged there? This a give to me macbook out of my friends frustration so it's all trial and error is working nice though right now.
 
The faint white screen with a progress bar is completely normal. It's a recovery screen that appears when the battery goes completely dead, or has been removed while power was turned on. The system protects itself by writing a 'state' to the hard drive. The next time there's power, the system does a short restore - which is what happened for you.

The chipped area on the right front edge of the palmrest is a typical defect. If you take to an Apple repair shop, or retail Apple Store - they will replace the top case/keyboard, and sometimes the display bezel, too, depending on the MacBook model. The little bump strip that touches the palmrest when the lid is closed - is what causes that damage. Apple will probably replace it at no charge to you - assuming there's no other obvious cause.
The other advantage to getting that fixed - there will then be easy access to look at the sleep LED connector, and maybe get that working, too! You would expect some charge for THAT, which would be unrelated to the top case repair - which is simply replacing the plastics. That repair would make the LED easy to get at.
 
I going to take the keyboard off and do an inspect of the internals let you know how turns out. I've managed to fix everything the apple store has told me was high cost on my own at a fraction of the cost.
 
One more thing in the system specs it shows cdrw dvdrw drive normal macbook superdrive when I stick a dvd in it spits it out when I stick a cd in it reads it and burns it.
 
Nothing too unusual about a MacBook superdrive getting a little flaky. The DVD portion is much closer tolerances, and more likely to give problems as a result. Try the usual "blow air in the slot", and try a cleaning disk as another possible help.

Anyway, as you are familiar with an Apple store, be sure to ask about replacing that top case, because of the cracks on the front edge. You should mention Apple's service article TS1964. You can't view that article, but they can. If your MacBook is less than 5 years old, then that likely will apply to you, unless there's other un-related damage to the top.
 
Is it possible for a battery thats blinking to make a complete short in the entire board like the first time it killed the charger?
 
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