Crap. Second mac laptop to take a dive in six months.
This one, a 14″ G3 ibook (800mhz).
Specifically, the video died on this one. You can start it up and hear it do its thing, but the screen stays blank. Also the little power-on light doesn’t come on when it’s on, nor does it pulse when it’s sleeping.
Just plain dead video.
It happened pretty suddenly.
Is this thing hosed? Any suggestions on what I could try to fix it?
This is one of the worst times for this to happen, financially. :\
Any readers I haven’t managed to alienate thoroughly yet, got any ideas?
THINGS TRIED
- Zap the Pram (hold down command option P R while booting) — no effect
STILL TO TRY
- See if the ibook is covered by the logic board failure dealy — take it to the apple store tomorrow.
Ed…
I think I’ve got a pretty good idea. Same thing happened to my ibook a while back.
I’d argue that it might be the relatively well known logic board problem that g3 laptops had. Apple actually paid to have mine replaced–but mine (a 900 mhz g3) was just barely within the extended warranty for that problem.
I link Apple’s information about it in my post.
http://jim.puddingbowl.org/archives/2006/02/ibook_repairs.html
I’ll give the apple store a try.
Have you tried connecting an external monitor to the ibook? Just a thought.
Round these parts we recently had a dual USB iBook (my wife’s) give up the ghost. Dead video as well. Also dead logic board. Not, however, covered by the program. This is why my wife now has a new MacBook and I have a 15″ g4 Powerbook. Yikes. So I hope you’re covered, Ed.
Since when do you alienate readers? I thought that was my job.
Thanks, jbm. My guess is it isn’t covered but I’m taking it to the Apple Store today to check.
I figured filling the front page almost entirely with depressing political news stories might alienate a few. :)
I have an apple laptop you could borrow for a while if needs be.
Topher — you rock. It’s OK though, my boss recently bought a macbook pro and he is gonna handle my mac compiling needs.
I went to the Apple Store and this is what I found:
Symptomatically, it is almost certainly the classic G3 logic board problem.
However, the machine will not boot at all, not even in target mode, not with an external monitor, not nothing nohow, and so I can’t get to the serial number via OS X.
And it has been removed/erased from the place where it’s supposed to be, under the keyboard, in the case. I bought it refurbed or something from some outfit I found through dealmac.com, and I can’t even remember the name of the people I bought it from, and haven’t been able to dig it up in my mail or anything.
No serial number means no return or exchange; I am hosed.