!@#$%*()

[mdlbear]

Something in this POS powerbook is seriously horked -- it appears to work OK on wall power, but doesn't even come back from sleep if it's not plugged in. Probably not the battery; one moment it was fine on battery power, then it just blinked out and didn't come back until I hard-cycled it by pulling the battery, then plugged it in again.

Anyway, it's entirely possible that I won't be keeping up with LJ at all if it finally croaks. My cell # is behind a cut tag a couple of posts back.

Comments

[animekid.livejournal.com]

What brand laptop is this?
I've heard of this problem with some IBMs here at work.

[mdlbear]

Apple Powerbook G4. I inherited it from someone else at work. chaoswolf's laptop is in the shop, otherwise I would have brought my nice old Thinkpad running Debian. And probably have a different set of problems.

[animekid.livejournal.com]

Oh okay...was thinking it was an IBM I saw while I was over at your house once.

The IBM models that they had deployed here at Synopsys has this thing where you have to reset the EEPROM due to some weird bug about it going in suspend/standby sometimes.

Macs have a different process to reset the EEPROM if need be but I don't know it =\
Hrmmm...

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Hmm, this sounds suspiciously like it might be related to some problems I've had with my IBM thinkpad, recently, that I muttered about here over at Starport. So do you know to reset the IBM EEPROM, she asks with non-neutral interest?

[animekid.livejournal.com]

It's a long shot because with computers...anything's possible.

But with my experience here with those suckers...such is the case described:

Laptop won't power on with battery (which is supposedly charged)
Still won't power on without battery & power adapter.
Laptop won't power on without battery but with AC adapter

Colleague gets to it...does the same thing to confirm.
Then proceeds to clear EEPROM by pressing and holding the power button.
This was done with battery removed and AC adapter plugged in.

I think it may work otherwise but that was my experience there
(We have pretty much phased out IBMs and gone over to Dells so I haven't worked with such recently, but my colleague said that's common for IBM laptops here)

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Sounds strangely familiar... I got mine to pull out of this once by a variation on this technique. But I wasn't sure quite what I had done that helped. Thanks for the info. It may have future use (though I hope not).

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Is this "weird laptop problem" month or something?

[mdlbear]

Seems to be sort of working at the moment -- even had it on battery for a few seconds before I closed the lid on it to forestall another hang. But I don't trust it. Not at all.