Powerbook G4 15"….Many Problems

Beemer72 said:

Hello all!



I recently purchased a 1.67 Ghz 512 Mb Ram 15 inch Powerbook G4 off of ebay. It was described as having a dead PRAM battery and that was the case of why the clock wasn't staying set. However, there are many more problems other than this.



1. If you close the lid on the computer to sleep it, then open it, it wakes up for about 5 seconds and then goes back to sleep. But, now it won't wake up at all. The pulsing light is a bit dimmer, but when you put the lid back down, it pulses like normal sleep. The only way to fix this is to take the battery out and disconnect any power, then press the power button to make it turn off. Then put power back on, and it starts right up.



2. The backlit keyboard doesn't work. The F8,9, and 10 keys have no input, and there are no options to turn it on in system preferences.



3. The clock seems to not save the time randomly, but I don't know if this is because of a spotty internet connection (where it goes and corrects itself without asking), or if it is something else.



Note: The computer came with Leopard and these same problems, I wiped it and installed Tiger but this didn't change anything. Also, I have replaced the PRAM battery and this hasn't remedied any of the problems either.



Please help!

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Beemer72 said:

Yes. Fully updated to 10.4.11 and I have reset both the PMU and PRAM 3 or more times.

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There has also been a rash of reports concerning sudden and pervasive sleeping of 1.5 and 1.67 GHz models known as Narcoleptic Aluminum Powerbook Syndrome. Symptoms include the PowerBook suddenly entering sleep mode, no matter what the battery level is or if it is plugged in. One cause is the ambient light sensing, and associated instruction set coding, with possible keyboard backlight and sleep light issues accompanying the so-called "narcolepsy". Another cause is the trackpad heat sensor monitoring the trackpad; system logs report "Power Management received emergency overtemp signal. Going to sleep.".

To correct this, service groups will often replace the logic board or power converter, but the actual fix (depending on the model) for the first cause is to replace or remove the left or right ambient light sensors; and for the second cause, disconnect, remove, or replace the heat sensor, or the entire top case which holds the trackpad heat sensor. Alternatively, there are reports which detail success in removing certain sensor kernel extensions or rebuilding the kernel using the Darwin Open Source project after commenting out the relevant sleepSystem() call; though permanent solution of the sleep issue in this manner is little documented.

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Beemer72 said:

No. Nothing worked under Leopard either, I assumed that it was just the PRAM battery and installed Tiger while waiting for the battery to be delivered.

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