MacBook Help!

[Spencer Reynen]

Hello MacRumors forum.

My friend recently bought a new MacBook White and came to me because he was having trouble with it. Usually people come to me when they have tech issues, but this is one I couldn't really do, I just help people with minor stuff, and to most of you this is probably a minor problem but I would just like to know what to do before I mess with my friends mac.

There are two issues with his MacBook- The first is that when he presses the power button, the screen stays black, does not boot up, and the laptop just keeps beeping. Not three times (like the usual memory issue), but over and over. It does this until he's lucky and finally turns on right and goes to the Apple logo and everythings fine and what not.
The second issue with it is that he can't bring it back from sleep mode. He said it was plugged in, and charging when he left it.

I have a feeling that the first one is a memory issue, but I can't be sure (because i think usually it beeps three times with that). And I'm pretty sure the second thing is also related to the memory. But can I get some help and have someone "diagnose" it and tell me what to do.

Thank you so much for your help.

 

[Detrius]

Sounds like bad RAM. Try KG RAM.

http://memtest.org/

 

[Spencer Reynen]

Thanks. I know someone said with that many beeps it could be the hard drive too. So could it be the HD or the memory or both?

 

[Detrius]

The hard drive doesn't cause beeps. A hard drive is not necessary for productive use of the computer. On some of the newer machines, I've seen them start beeping after a kernel panic, even though there's no RAM problem, but beeps like that are supposed to mean that the machine failed POST. In the old days, it was easy: one beep was no RAM, two was wrong RAM, and three was bad RAM, but it still boils down to RAM.

 

[Spencer Reynen]

The hard drive doesn't cause beeps. A hard drive is not necessary for productive use of the computer. On some of the newer machines, I've seen them start beeping after a kernel panic, even though there's no RAM problem, but beeps like that are supposed to mean that the machine failed POST. In the old days, it was easy: one beep was no RAM, two was wrong RAM, and three was bad RAM, but it still boils down to RAM.

Thanks man. I think my friend is going to have someone check it out so we'll know for sure what it is. I'll relay the helpful info to my buddy but if anyone has something else they wanna add, it would help. He's pretty mad about it.