Powerbook G4 1.67GHz - Random hard freezes

Hello all,

Hoping for some help. My girlfriend has a 17" G4 Powerbook - she recently bought it second hand. It's one of the late models, with a 1.67 GHz processor and 2GB of RAM installed. It runs like a dream, except for one thing - it has a propensity to freeze occasionally.

They're not kernel panics - they're hard freezes, where everything locks up completely. Can't move the mouse, can't force quit, nothing - the only thing to do is switch off and on again.

I've looked through the logs and can't find any crash reports, so I'm at a loss to what's causing this. The only lead I have is that it only seems to happen when the machine's running on battery - it's never frozen when the power cord's plugged in. I thought it might be overheating, but it froze this morning after only 5 mins of use, so now I'm stumped.

Any ideas as to what might be causing this? Is it a known issue?

Any help much appreciated.

KingYaba said:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=436503&tstart=0

Read the first post and tell me what you think.

Click to expand...

Wow... I think that it's describing exactly the same problem we seem to be having. I'll try the workaround that disables processor nap and see how it goes. Thanks ever so much for your help.

(Apologies for the delayed reply, too - the forum seems to have been down for most of the day).