I never did come up with a cause for the failure of my wife’s iBook. We bought a new aluminum MacBook. Very, very, very nice. (Yes: Three Verys!)
We had all the data from the old machine backed up (both to the server in the house and to Amazon’s S3 via Jungledisk), but in the interests of laziness I ended up popping the hard drive out of the old computer (a fun process!) and then used an IDE to USB cable and Apple’s built-in data migration stuff to set the new computer up. Took many many hours anyway since there was about 35GB of data that needed to be moved, but at least I didn’t have to really babysit things.
Anyway, when the process was done, my wife was up and running pretty much without any issues on her nice new computer.
I still have the old computer. A new motherboard, which I’m sure would resolve the issue, is something like $250. Not sure if there’s any really good reason to go that route. I’m thinking that maybe that money might be better spent on one of those new Mac mini’s that are rumored to be coming. And that’s assuming we need to have three Macs in the house at all. But I keep thinking I want to do more with GarageBand. Not a great reason. My guess is that we just become a two-Mac family.
It’s a holiday from work today, but unfortunately I’m spending the day working on my wife’s iBook. It has suddenly developed a serious problem. The symptom is apparently a very common one: When the power is turned on the screen stays black and the fan spins at full speed.
We do have all the files on the computer completely backed up and it is an older computer, but with all the economic uncertainty out there it would still be nice to keep this laptop running for a while longer. So I’m seeing if I can fix it.
Corey Arnold has the best description of this issue. A chip that controls power management gets worked away from the motherboard. Re-soldering or even just pushing the chip back down usually does the trick.
The best iBook teardown instructions are (as always) at iFixit. So I used those to disassemble the iBook.
But even with all the good info I’m not having much success. Apparently the motherboard on the 1.33 GHz iBooks is somewhat different from the ones that Corey has. The main chip that typically has problems is in a different location. And on my wife’s iBook this chip doesn’t seem to be the culprit. There are no obvious solder issues and no amount of pushing or prodding makes things work better.
I guess I’ll just have to keep disassembling the poor little thing. There are rumors that the wi-fi card can cause issues as well…