Quark Forums

Well, the logic board finally gave out this morning. Had the forums up and it froze. Shutdown, tried to reboot, nothing. Worked with it for a while, got it to boot twice and each time it froze at the login screen and would not reboot. If I wait a while it may reboot but it freezes at the grayscreen and then won't reboot. So, at this point I think the logic board is toast.

 Oh well. It was a good run. January 2001 to October 2009!

Anyone out there have a spare Powerbook or iBook lying around that they'd let go for $100 or less? That's about all I can afford at the moment. Looks like I'll be tied to my PC desktop at home if I can't find anything. Oh well again. At this point anything I end up with is likely to be better than the old PB. 

Well! Won an auction on eBay. Bought a used 17" 1GHZ Powerbook  G4 with 1GB of RAM. Seller did not list the details of the HD, but I already have a 320GB HD that I had bought for the previously mentioned dead Titanium. Looking to be back in business next week!

 It's got Leopard on it, so we'll see how that goes! 

 Just for interest, was it the logic board?

I had a similar problem early this year (G5 2.7DP) and it was one of the cpus. Second time it broke down it was cpu and logic board.

Yep. Logic board. Dead as a doornail. I can try and start it up, but it will only get as far as starting to load the blue screen (the one after the gray Apple and gear screen) and then it freezes. Each subsequent boot is shorter. I can zap pram till the cows come home to try and get it to boot, but again it only goes so far. I took it to the Apple store and they confirmed it.

I'm satisfied though. It lasted for eight years with rarely being turned off and with heavy use. 

Well, update on this. The screen went out on my PB about a month after I got it. Which I didn't complain about given what I paid for this. But now, I just won a 1.67GHZ 17" PB with 2GB of RAM on eBay. Somebody dropped it on it's corner where the superdrive is, but the screen is good and it works. So, probably going to switch the bottom case of my current 17" with this one.

So, now I have a speed bump, a bump in RAM and I do believe the 1.67GHZ models come with USB 2.0. Not to mention the HD screen. 

Not that any cares anymore either, but the PB that I bought to replace the one with the burned out screen did indeed turn out to be the dual layer PB. I'm not so sure the seller knew what he had or this PB would have commanded a much higher price than it did.

Secondly, it turns out that the screen on the 1GHZ PB is actually still working. If the machine is cold I just have to wait for the screen to come on. 

Lastly, the whole thing that started this thread for me, my Titanium is about to be resurrected. Bought a new logic board for it at a cheap price. So. Now I will have 3 PBs.

Well, swapped out the logic board on my old PB tonight. It's alive and kicking on Leopard. Now my wife has a Mac to use! 

 Hi, glad to see a TiBook back in business.  I have a question, was installing the new logic board difficult?  Seems things are so tiny in their, I was reading your thread and it sparked my interest.

Cheers.

Actually, it was far less difficult than I thought it would be. I bought my logicboard from here. They are going for $89 there right now. Then I just followed this guide at ifixit.com which is pretty comprehensive.

One piece of advice. Examine the logicboard you purchase and the one you are replacing. There may be parts on the one being replaced that are not there on the new board. I found that to be the case with the logicboard I got for my wife's Mac.

I'm finding that the more I am inside these Macs of mine the less complicated they seem to be. Right now I am in the process of replacing the LVDS cable for my Mac with the screen problem. I've replaced it but the back cover of the LCD is not wanting to reattach properly. Ah well, if worse comes to worse I'm not out a screen because it still works hooked up to a monitor. 

 My TiBook 400 after the logicboard replacement. 

My 17" PB and my TiBook 400. 

Yet again, not that anyone cares, but…

Since the last post, I have replaced the screen on the 1Ghz 17" PB since it was not only the LVDS cable, but the screen that went bad too. I have replaced the DC Inverter board (1Ghz 17" PB) because the Mac was no longer charging. And…

Several months ago my daughter decided to send the TiBook flying off the coach. It hit flat on the carpet but my wife started experiencing freezes. So, I had to put the Mac out of commission. It would only boot in safe mode. About a month ago I bought her a 1Ghz 12" PB off eBay. Screen was broken (this poor Mac had rolled down a flight of stairs), so I also bought a used replacment screen. I swapped it out, broke a few parts and replaced those. Getting to the inside of a 12" PB is MUCH more difficult and much more delicate. Anyway, she has a completely function 12" PB with max Ram (1.25GB) now.

Today, I decided to try one last crack at the TiBook before selling it for parts on eBay. Got it working! I don't know why, but there are some ATI/NVDIA drivers that the Mac was choking on when loading. Since those don't load in safe mode that's why the Mac was booting in Safe Mode. Also, safe mode or not, whenever I closed the lid I had an instant freeze. Now, I understand when you close the lid on a Mac laptop the OS writes to the hard drive everything that's in memory. No idea what's going on there with the TiBook when I close the lid, but I disabled this feature (it's called Safe Sleep) by issuing two terminal commands that someone with a MacBook had done because they had the same problem. Well, now the Mac goes to sleep on lid close, just like it's supposed to and no freeze.

So, now I have three Powerbooks!

 I hope you've let Apple know about this ...

Shaun

I'm keeping knowledge of my undead TiBook from Apple. I want to keep it. They might take it away.  

Glenn.

 I hear that a lot. But I'm running it on both my 17" PBs. It's a little slower on my older one, but that's only because it has half the memory that my newer one has. I've found it to be incredibly stable and it's actually made things much better for these two Macs. Fan control is considerably better, backlighting, etc. Overall it's running real smooth.

The only issue: memory. It reserves far more memory than Tiger did. However, it seems to handle it better because at the very least my performance has not declined. It takes forever to install though (lots of little files with ACLs), forever to index (the first time) and you might as well go out and get lunch if you want to repair permissions. I would not suggest installing on a machine that has anything less than 1GB of Ram though.

I have it on my coworker's G4/400 with 1GB of Ram and it's slow, but it gets the job done.

Well, the continuing saga of the undead TiBook 400 continues. It *died* again on Thursday night. So, I guess that makes three times now. I had my daughter using it for kid games. She wanted to play something else. The Mac was responsive, but would not quit the game, so I shut it down. Rebooted and got a gray screen with the Apple logo and no gear. Restarted again and all I got that time was the original OS9 gray screen. No boot. So, I declared it dead. But, it doesn't end there.

Today I won another Mac on eBay. $24.33 and $14.99 shipping. This Mac is a 1GHZ Titanum with 1GB ram. The LCD is broken off the hinges and doesn't work. But the Mac is working. It's coming with no harddrive. My plan is to take the broken screen off and replace it with the good one on my TiBook 400. The one I just bought is also missing screws so I will use the ones from my 400 and will also drop in the hard drive from my 400. That should give me a good 1GHZ Titanium that I can upgrade to Leopard. My son will get this Mac and my daughter will get his iBook.

Kind of funny because the only difference between this new Mac and my 17" 1GHZ Mac is the physical size, screen resolution and max ram. The new Mac also has an ATI Radeon 9000 with 64MB of VRAM and a Superdrive (DVD and CD R/W). My son is basically getting a rocket.

Not bad. $40 (rounded up) for a machine that was originally $3000!