OT: MacBook randomly shuts down..

[Kay C Lan]

On Jan 7, 2008 8:26 AM, Jeff Reynolds <jeff at siphonophore.com> wrote:

>
> all the old machines have gone onto second
> and even third lives with others and all were retired due to just
> extreme old age and not to dying...


And I'd like to thank you for passing them on.

My experience is that I do the same with hardware as software. I own OSX
10.5 but I won't install it until 10.5.2 arrives (although having said that
it seems to be a very long time coming, maybe I'll try 10.5.1) I've owned
umpteen Mac's over the years and only bought 2 brand new. The first, a
PowerBook 540C, which broke within the first week, motherboard promptly
replaced, worked the last time I cranked it up. The other a first generation
G5 kept crashing - a very non-Mac experience, and although I had bought an
extended AppleCare warranty, nothing could ever be found to be wrong with
it, the crash was just too random. The problem eventually disappeared many
many frustrating months later after firmware and OS upgrades.

Having been a happy user of many many second hand Macs I've concluded there
are two types of computers; Lemons and Workhorses. As far as the Lemons are
concerned, if they are repaired under warranty, many turn into Workhorses. I
let others go through the hassle of separating the Lemons from the
Workhorses;-)

As far as workhorses go the most miraculous to date is a Lombard PB I bought
in 2001, it was 2 years old when I bought it. About 3 years into my
ownership, just sitting typing into it a great cloud of smoke erupted from
the keyboard, I immediately pulled the battery and a fast thinking colleague
seated on the other side of the desk pulled the AC power cord. The office
was full of the acrid smell of burning carbon.

Just for curiosity, as it was now 5+ years old, I took it to Apple to see
how much to fix (a new motherboard I figured). A week later they reported
back $0, nothing! They said there was nothing wrong with it, they'd carried
out all the hardware tests and it had passed.

Clearly unable to believe this I went to pick it up and demanded the
technician start it up for me and show it run. Sure enough it did. I
explained what had happened, I even opened the thing up, pretty easy as all
you needed to do was release the keyboard. There inside it was a smoker's
fingers, the back side of the keyboard was all smoke stained as were parts
of the frame, HD, RAM and motherboard!

Anyway it worked, so away I went. Knowing full well that it's days were
numbered I quickly bought a secondhand TiBook. The Lombard went to our very
lysdexic son, his special needs teacher had some typing, spelling and other
programs he could run on his own computer rather than wait for the schools
limited resources to become available. I knew this was going to be brutal on
the Lombard, especially the screen hinges which were the Achilles' heel of
the model. Just by coincidence a coworker mentioned that he had an old Pismo
(basically the same model except with firewire built in) lying around that
he didn't use plus and old Lombard which had a broken screen. I purchased
these two for $50.

About a year after the Lombard smoked, it finally failed; I like to think
because of the failure to follow my simple instruction to turn the computer
off any time it was not in use - this was also just a good safe work
practice because if the the Lombard ever smoked again, fire might follow.
Anyway, sure enough the Lombard was left on overnight and in the morning it
wouldn't wake up or turn on. Thankfully it hadn't burst into flames in the
middle of the night.

I simply swapped the screen off the smoked Lombard onto the Lombard with the
broken screen. The Lombard (and the Pismo) still work today and are used
almost daily.

As to Sarah's mention of coffee and keyboards.

My daughter rang from Uni to complain that the hand-me-down AlBook I'd given
her was suddenly experiencing a screen failure. I got her to take it to an
Apple store and have someone start it up in Target Disk mode and confirm all
here data was safe - thankfully it was.

I picked up a similar second hand AlBook, again figuring I could use the
broken one for spares, and did a simple HD swap. Along the way I also
discovered many of the keys didn't work. The cause of such a strange failure
was all revealed when my wife happen to be reading my daughters FaceBook
entries. Foolishly she had mentioned spilling coffee into the computer. Not
happy!!

I've since informed my daughter that it's the last laptop she'll be getting
from me, from here on she can by her own electronic saucers.

I will be giving the de-ionized water a go though, thanks for the tip Sarah.

And lastly: I still run a IIci to print out on a Personal LaserWriter 300.
The 300 has no drivers for System 8 or 9 so I have to use a System 7
computer :-) And someone was wondering why FutureBASIC may be of interest to
me; although I think BackToTheFutureBASIC may be a more apt name ;-)