Hey there,
First off, thanks for offering volunteer free support.
Second, I'm a technically inclined person.. so.. please talk over my head
.
Third.. I have some sort of hardware problem.
I inherited a powerbook G4 Titanium Murcury 400Mhz with 512MB of ram and a 40GB Hard drive.
It works very well albeit a bit slower then today's model powerbook..( arg, no quartz extreme hardware accelleration.. ) with the exception of a few items..
Item 1. The Right Arrow and the Up arrow on the stock Apple Keyboard 'sometimes' work and sometimes doesn't work. Based on usage (for about 6 months now).. I don't think it has anything to do with the keyboard.. as.. the keys won't be recongnized for 3 weeks and then I'll walk away from the powerbook and it will sleep... Then I'll wake it up and suddenly the arrows mentioned above work.. until It goes back to sleep. Any idea what this intermittant keyboard problem is? I have been using QuickKeys to make the Function plus the left arrow move the cursor right and Function plus the Down arrow to move the cursor up.. however that program is hugely memory intensive. 40MB even when it is doing absolutely nothing. I opened up they keyboard viewer and it doesn't register the buttons as being pressed when they don't work. I figure though.. that a keyboard issue would be something that happens 100% of the time.. and maybe a logic board problem or something like that would be an intermittant problem like I'm mentioning.. though. I don't know for sure.
Item 2. I just purchased a new Hi-Capacity battery for it. (apple doesn't sell the OEM battery anymore). And, some of the time, the powerbook needs to have the PMU reset with the little pen tip button on the back. It has really only started requiring this since the new battery was installed. Interestingly, the battery reports that it's capacity is 4619 and the Absolute Max Capacity reports as 4200. Any Idea what is causing the PMU to require to be reset?
Item 3. The Airport works most of the time.. however.. once in a while.. (frequency of about 3 times a week or so) the airport card won't detect a network in a place that it has had full signal before. I checked another wireless card (a NetGear MA101) and it got a signal, I also purchased a PCMCIA Wireless card for when I encounter this.. Any idea what this could be caused by?
Item 4(fixed for now.. but I'm mentioning it for historic purposes). The Pin of the YOYO power cable was stuck in the AC connector on the logic board. It was shorting out the power cable and not getting any power to the logic board/PMU. I took the powerbook apart and pushed the pin out the front of the AC connector from the back of the AC connector. The YOYO cable is a bit flaky.. but it always works if I twist it a bit. *no pin tip.. which I'm assuming was the grounding portion of the connector*.. though the cable is a 2 pronged (no ground) AC plug. The keyboard was always flaky like I mentioned in Item 1.. even before the pin got stuck.
Item 5. The Stock combodrive reads CDs but doesn't read DVDs very well. I think this may be the way this combo drive works.. as it is the original combodrive with the Murcury powerbook. It is OVERLY sensitive to scratches and smudges on DVDs. Overly to the fact that the DVD has to be absolutely perfect or there is a read error on the DVD. This has hampered my ability to install Tiger.. which I bought a copy from the Apple Store. (I could send out for CDs.. however I'd love to know if there was something else that I could do)
Item 6. My Hard drive is not a stock hard drive.. it is a Hitachi HITACHI_DK23EA-40. It hates going to sleep and waking up. It takes 2 minutes for the powerbook to become responsive after a sleep.. and always becomes responsive just after a hard drive chirp. The hard drive is working perfectly other then that. Parhaps it doesn't have a very good sleep mechanism.. who knows No abnormal sounds or hard drive 'retries' that are associated with a bad hard drive. Any driver updates or anything like that.. that I can download to help this hard drive wake better?
I love the powerbook very much.. I take it with me wherever I go.. keep notes.. my contact lists.. .. Use it for Web Development using Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.. Record Audio with Audacity. Develop software with it. and all and all use the heck out of it . Currently I have OS 10.3.9 installed on it.. ( just re-installed it from CDs using the Erase and install method ) I use SideTrack 1.3 to take full advantage of the Synaptics touch pad (yay, it scrolls now).. I *have* a copy of XLR8's MACh Speed Control.. and have run the backside cache at one level higher in mhz.. at the moment, I can't remember if it was 199Mhz or 233Mhz.. but I have not installed it since I Erased and Reinstalled the system. Sometime before I inherited the powerbook, the screen lock button broke. I'm eventually going to get that replaced or get a New Powerbook. It is the metal portion of the locking mechanism on the button. I have used pmset lidwake 0 so it doesn't wake when the lid comes up.
Thanks again
Dan
First off, thanks for offering volunteer free support.
Second, I'm a technically inclined person.. so.. please talk over my head
.Third.. I have some sort of hardware problem.
I inherited a powerbook G4 Titanium Murcury 400Mhz with 512MB of ram and a 40GB Hard drive.
It works very well albeit a bit slower then today's model powerbook..( arg, no quartz extreme hardware accelleration.. ) with the exception of a few items..
Item 1. The Right Arrow and the Up arrow on the stock Apple Keyboard 'sometimes' work and sometimes doesn't work. Based on usage (for about 6 months now).. I don't think it has anything to do with the keyboard.. as.. the keys won't be recongnized for 3 weeks and then I'll walk away from the powerbook and it will sleep... Then I'll wake it up and suddenly the arrows mentioned above work.. until It goes back to sleep. Any idea what this intermittant keyboard problem is? I have been using QuickKeys to make the Function plus the left arrow move the cursor right and Function plus the Down arrow to move the cursor up.. however that program is hugely memory intensive. 40MB even when it is doing absolutely nothing. I opened up they keyboard viewer and it doesn't register the buttons as being pressed when they don't work. I figure though.. that a keyboard issue would be something that happens 100% of the time.. and maybe a logic board problem or something like that would be an intermittant problem like I'm mentioning.. though. I don't know for sure.
Item 2. I just purchased a new Hi-Capacity battery for it. (apple doesn't sell the OEM battery anymore). And, some of the time, the powerbook needs to have the PMU reset with the little pen tip button on the back. It has really only started requiring this since the new battery was installed. Interestingly, the battery reports that it's capacity is 4619 and the Absolute Max Capacity reports as 4200. Any Idea what is causing the PMU to require to be reset?
Item 3. The Airport works most of the time.. however.. once in a while.. (frequency of about 3 times a week or so) the airport card won't detect a network in a place that it has had full signal before. I checked another wireless card (a NetGear MA101) and it got a signal, I also purchased a PCMCIA Wireless card for when I encounter this.. Any idea what this could be caused by?
Item 4(fixed for now.. but I'm mentioning it for historic purposes). The Pin of the YOYO power cable was stuck in the AC connector on the logic board. It was shorting out the power cable and not getting any power to the logic board/PMU. I took the powerbook apart and pushed the pin out the front of the AC connector from the back of the AC connector. The YOYO cable is a bit flaky.. but it always works if I twist it a bit. *no pin tip.. which I'm assuming was the grounding portion of the connector*.. though the cable is a 2 pronged (no ground) AC plug. The keyboard was always flaky like I mentioned in Item 1.. even before the pin got stuck.
Item 5. The Stock combodrive reads CDs but doesn't read DVDs very well. I think this may be the way this combo drive works.. as it is the original combodrive with the Murcury powerbook. It is OVERLY sensitive to scratches and smudges on DVDs. Overly to the fact that the DVD has to be absolutely perfect or there is a read error on the DVD. This has hampered my ability to install Tiger.. which I bought a copy from the Apple Store. (I could send out for CDs.. however I'd love to know if there was something else that I could do)
Item 6. My Hard drive is not a stock hard drive.. it is a Hitachi HITACHI_DK23EA-40. It hates going to sleep and waking up. It takes 2 minutes for the powerbook to become responsive after a sleep.. and always becomes responsive just after a hard drive chirp. The hard drive is working perfectly other then that. Parhaps it doesn't have a very good sleep mechanism.. who knows
No abnormal sounds or hard drive 'retries' that are associated with a bad hard drive. Any driver updates or anything like that.. that I can download to help this hard drive wake better?I love the powerbook very much
.. I take it with me wherever I go.. keep notes.. my contact lists.. .. Use it for Web Development using Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.. Record Audio with Audacity. Develop software with it. and all and all use the heck out of it . Currently I have OS 10.3.9 installed on it.. ( just re-installed it from CDs using the Erase and install method ) I use SideTrack 1.3 to take full advantage of the Synaptics touch pad (yay, it scrolls now).. I *have* a copy of XLR8's MACh Speed Control.. and have run the backside cache at one level higher in mhz.. at the moment, I can't remember if it was 199Mhz or 233Mhz.. but I have not installed it since I Erased and Reinstalled the system. Sometime before I inherited the powerbook, the screen lock button broke. I'm eventually going to get that replaced or get a New Powerbook. It is the metal portion of the locking mechanism on the button. I have used pmset lidwake 0 so it doesn't wake when the lid comes up.Thanks again
Dan