My Titanium PowerBook G4: I'm not dead.

In 2002, I bought my first Mac, a shiny new Titanium Powerbook with 800mhz G4 processor. I've toted it around the world in these past five years, and even after my purchase of the MacBook Pro, I still used it quite heavily as a web browser. The past couple of weeks have had me ready to declare it a loss; I could no longer reliably use it, as it would lock up and freeze intermittently. In suspend mode, the TiBook would occasionally wake up, but more often than not just stay in suspension, or lock up very quickly afterward. Sometimes when I powered it up, the TiBook would beep at me 3 times, which meant that it wasn't detecting any memory.

I've had this happen before, and because it was still under AppleCare, I sent it in, and they sent it back, replacing several fans and the main logic board. Since my AppleCare contract has long since expired, I removed the keyboard and poked around for a bit. I took out the memory and ran it for a bit, seeing if perhaps one of the DIMMs was bad. I was still getting freezes.

I was getting ready to write the obituary on my Powerbook, when I came upon a webpage with a similar problem while I was searching for alternative uses for dead laptops, and taking a closer look actually yielded a solution for me. There's a orange ribbon cable that runs the memory module socket to the board. There's a metal plate that covers part of the casing for the memory modules, and in my case part of the orange ribbon was under the metal plate. Wondering if making contact with the metal might result in a short/grounding interaction, I carefully nudged the orange ribbon to the right of the metal plate, and tested the TiBook out. Everything seems to be working now, with no more freezes.

I find it phenomenal that I've managed to keep this TiBook going on after all these years -- my laptop previous to the TiBook was a Sony VAIO, which managed to die after about two years or so, having a burnt-out motherboard that refused to power up. The Apple has lasted twice as long (and still looks relatively good, if not the chipped paint).