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GeeYouEye

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Dec 9, 2001
1,669
10
State of Denial
I have what I hope is a really unusual but easy to solve problem. I left my PowerBook unplugged by accident for several hours and when I got back the battery was depleted. What was unusual was that it was actually off, rather than simply asleep. So I booted up, and to my shock, the Bluetooth menu extra says "Bluetooth: Not Available" and the Bluetooth System PrefPane has disappeared. When I went to About This Mac to get to the System Profiler to see what it had regarding Bluetooth (nothing), I saw that the system was only registering 512 MB of my 1 GB of RAM. Further inspection in System Profiler revealed that one of the slots was "empty", though in reality both are filled with 512 MB each.

Has anyone seen anything like this before?
 

Abstract

macrumors Penryn
Dec 27, 2002
24,835
847
Location Location Location
Sounds bad.

If you have a 15" or 17" PB, take both RAM sticks out and switch them around. Reset PRAM. As for your missing BT.....not sure. Actually, I'd phone up Apple to ask about that. Have them check it over.
 

WinterMute

Moderator emeritus
Jan 19, 2003
4,776
5
London, England
I had the missing BT thing, but a hard shutdown and restart brought it back.

There have been other instances of BT disappearing, do a search.
 

Alfie

macrumors regular
Feb 22, 2004
147
26
South Dakota
I have an iBook instead of a Powerbook, but I had the bluetooth disappearance happen to me about 2 months after I bought the iBook. No apparent reason that I could see. I called Applecare, sent the iBook into them, and they replaced the module. Everything has been fine since. The problem didn't affect the RAM, however.
 

GeeYouEye

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Dec 9, 2001
1,669
10
State of Denial
Well, I tried the hard shutdown and restart, and that seems to have fixed the Bluetooth problem (though that messed up file associations which it took 2 regular restarts to fix), but the RAM problem remains, as well as another one: My startup chime appears to be gone. I wasn't sure because I wasn't in a quiet enough place yesterday to listen for it, but it's definitely not chiming, either on a regular startup, or even when resetting the PRAM. iTunes and other sounds work just fine, so this has me worried since the startup chime is a really low-level thing.
 

Ozi

macrumors regular
Apr 9, 2004
193
0
Melbourne, Australia.
Hard shutdown? I have the same problem currently with my pBook (battery completely depleted, BT no longer functions) but I cannot fix it. Whats this hard shutdown you talk about?
 

StarbucksSam

macrumors 65816
Nov 21, 2004
1,433
5
Washington, D.C.
Macmaniac said:
It sounds like you could have a bad logic board. If a slot dies and BT goes down, it could be the MLB. I hope you have AppleCare. Take it into an Apple service center and have them take a look at it.

What is a BT and MLB? I'm sorry, but I even read this post and did a double take. :) Please explain.
 

Applespider

macrumors G4
Midway through the Regent St campout, and despite the battery indicator saying an hour to go, my PB went to sleep and wouldn't wake up again. I wasn't sure whether it was battery/cold or whatever.

The helpful Genius the next morning, suggested that I'd run down both my main battery and the internal 'reserve' battery and that I might have to plug in the PB for 48 hoursand not use it :eek: to allow both to recharge fully. Worth a try?

Thankfully, mine wasn't quite as run down as he'd thought (I suspect being in the nice warm shop helped!) and a few minutes of charging gave enough juice to be able to shutdown (not sure if BT was there or not). A couple of hours charging at home and everything was OK again.
 

MacShep

macrumors newbie
Dec 12, 2004
5
0
how glad am I to have found this page!! following what sounds like my mac going too long without juice I find my BT has vanished... it looks like you folks have the answer and I am thankful.

I have had it go into sleep mode twice now wihtout enough energy to come back to life to be swithced off. One time this was when battery was down and other was when I thought I had a full or half battery. This has not happened in some time.. something to be concerned about? :(
 
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