G4 PowerBook freezing, won't restart

[bohemka]

Hey all.

My PowerBook G4 15" alu 1.25 ghz locked up out of nowhere the other night (while only running firefox). Couldn't even force quit, so after a long wait I manually shut it down. Then I couldn't get it going again.

I pulled the battery, let it sit overnight, and then it started up, only to freeze up again in 30 minutes. Same routine yesterday (though it lasted an hour or so).

I live in Germany and the only Apple store is hours away. And of course my Apple Care is expired. I've zapped the PRAM, reset the PMU, ran first aid on disk utilities (everything came back OK), but I'm freaking out. This thing is seriously important to me, and I can't afford to replace it.

I've read plenty of speculation that it could be the logic board, or that it's locking up from overheating, or maybe the hard drive is going bad (though the tests come back OK).

I spent a lot of money on this thing, I treat it better than I do myself, and I'm shocked that it could just go on me like that.

Are there any other tests I can perform at home before I travel hours to get this looked at? All suggestions are appreciated. Thanks.

 

[finnschi]

You can also go to a apple retailer, GRAVIS for example, you don't have to drive to munich did you try reistalling osx?

and you could also let UPS pick the macbook up at your house!

Hey all.

My PowerBook G4 15" alu 1.25 ghz locked up out of nowhere the other night (while only running firefox). Couldn't even force quit, so after a long wait I manually shut it down. Then I couldn't get it going again.

I pulled the battery, let it sit overnight, and then it started up, only to freeze up again in 30 minutes. Same routine yesterday (though it lasted an hour or so).

I live in Germany and the only Apple store is hours away. And of course my Apple Care is expired. I've zapped the PRAM, reset the PMU, ran first aid on disk utilities (everything came back OK), but I'm freaking out. This thing is seriously important to me, and I can't afford to replace it.

I've read plenty of speculation that it could be the logic board, or that it's locking up from overheating, or maybe the hard drive is going bad (though the tests come back OK).

I spent a lot of money on this thing, I treat it better than I do myself, and I'm shocked that it could just go on me like that.

Are there any other tests I can perform at home before I travel hours to get this looked at? All suggestions are appreciated. Thanks.

 

[bohemka]

Thanks, finnschi.

Yeah, I just noticed there's a Gravis in Mannheim (not too far), so I'll try that. I'm confused with the problem, though.

All the diagnostics (hardware test of logic board and hard drive; memtest) come back OK. And when it froze up last night, I rocked it back to maybe get some are under it and it unfroze. Maybe there's a loose connection that's shorting out on the case. Or maybe the hard drive only works when it's perpendicular now. I don't know.

Pretty upset about it though. I just talked my parents into buying a mac book pro. And now here I am typing about my broken mac on my twice-as-old PC laptop that runs like a champ. So much for reliability.

 

[annk]

...

Pretty upset about it though. I just talked my parents into buying a mac book pro. And now here I am typing about my broken mac on my twice-as-old PC laptop that runs like a champ. So much for reliability.

Well, that model of PB is not exactly new, so I am assuming you have gotten some years of use out of it. I wouldn't say that was a lack of reliability, they do die eventually.

 

[bohemka]

Fair enough Ann, but it's not extremely old, either. I've had plenty of laptops and I've never had a hard drive go bad. Until I bought Apple. I've poked around and the consensus is that the 80 GB Toshiba HD's, in a word, suck. Hundreds of posts on this. Apple should have addressed it.