Hi Folks
Sorry for the length of this Email but I am trying to give some background ...
BACKGROUND:
My Pismo has been giving relatively troublefree service for about 3.5 years:
* Battery is probably near dead with only 15 minutes of life and the onboard
backup battery (?) possibly is (near) dead too as I often lose time/date settings
if the main battery is discharged (presumably).
* The LG DVD player had to be serviced/replaced twice recently as disks no longer mounted.
It has had a memory and disk upgrade almost a couple of years ago (to run OS X) so it is now a
Powerbook G3/400Mhz 512MB/40GB.
* It has had OS X systems running on it since OS 10.1.5 through to 10.2.8 and now it is
running 10.3.4. I upgraded from 10.2.8 to 10.3.4 in the last few weeks.
PROBLEMS (In the last four days):
The Pismo refuses to wake up properly after sleep. It possibly may also fail to reboot
sometimes (but I dare not check this right now as I need to complete some projects on it).
If I close the lid, it usually goes to sleep but does not awake on reopening. Or possibly
it only partly awakes as I think I can hear the drive start up but the screen doesn't wake.
In this latter case power is making it to the keyboard as the caps lock/num lock light up.
On attempted reboot (via ctrl-cmd-power), on several attempts, I get a chime and then nothing
on the screen (and sometimes a distorted noise just after the chime).
Often, I get no chime but the drive appears to start up (not sure if this means the Pismo
was still on or not and it is failing to wake the screen.
Rebooting with a software restore disk (OS 9) the DVD player fails to start up ... and I
have to manually eject it ...
Reattempting reboot, I sometimes get a chime and then the screen comes up. Usually this
success only occurs after leaving the Powerbook alone and unplugged for about 10 hours.
(Maybe it is trying to tell me to give the poor thing a rest! 8-) )
I'm wishing for a backup Powerbook (or even iMac) since I am backing up on an external
firewire drive religiously but depleted finances (in between paying contracts) prevent
me from pursuing a purchase; hopefully I can borrow something if need be to access my
project files, as my other Macs (classic II, Peforma 520 do not support USB or firewire).
Luckily I am putting some stuff onto 100MB ZIPs (but it is really cramped and slow).
Anyways, I feel this sort of behaviour may have been discussed before and I am
wondering if there are some reasonable solutions. Luckily I had purchased an extension
to my AppleCare so I can send it in for service (but I can't do without it right now!)
and see if the Apple Techs can both find and solve the problem.
Is the age of the main/backup batteries an issue? Or is it likely to be some power board issue? Or a loose RAM board? ... though the fact that it reboots and runs OK after 10 hours means the latter is unlikely. Does 10.3.x have any sleep/boot issues?
Thanks for any ideas,
Harry. (DownUnder in Canberra, 1st day of winter and snowfields getting some powder!)
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