iBook G3 won't start up 1

[arjena]

I have a G3 iBook 900 MHz which worked fine until a couple of months ago. I left it to sleep with the lid closed for a couple of days and when I picked it up again the battery was empty. I plugged it in and tried to boot but nothing happened. I waited until the battery was full, nothing. Tried booting with the battery removed, nothing.
I reset the PMU with battery and power supply removed, battery in place and all other combinations, no go.
I even took out the capacitor that looks like a PRAM battery from the motherboard (the most ultimate reset I could think of). When the power is plugged in there is power on the firewire port. There is also power on the logic board with the battery in place and/or the power supply plugged in.
It's not the power switch, it's not the sleep reed switch in the display.
Since the only solution seemed to be a logic board replacement (costing about 800 Euro's) I emptied the piggy bank and got myself a macbook.
Two weeks ago, as a last check before putting the parts on e-bay, I plugged in the power brick (battery was completely empty of course), pushed the power button and... it booted fine. My old friend was back!
It immediately started dowloading system updates so I left and went to sleep.
The following morning, alas, the screen was black and the iBook was off. Again pressing the power button did absolutely nothing. I took out the battery and left it for a week. Then I put the battery back in, and voila, iBook alive again. The system updates were not installed so it must have turned off before the downloads were complete. I suspected sleep mode was the cause so I set the computer to never go to sleep. I shut down the computer, waited a couple of minutes and turned it on again. Still no problem. Again I started the software update and again... after half an hour downloading it turned off while I was looking the other way. And of course it would not start anymore. I can understand why letting it rest for a while may decharge some capacitor so everything is reset. But why does it shut down after a while...
I suspected the PRAM battery only to find the iBook does not even have one...
I have nothing to loose but time, so if anybody knows of a part that may cause this failure I will grab the soldering iron and replace the part. (yes, I do have a lot of experience soldering electronics)

Any suggestion is welcome.

 

[jmgalvin]

With notebooks, the battery acts as the pram battery. When it completley dies, you lose the pram. It only needs a little bit of charge to retain pram but needs some. Letting the machine sit around for a long time with no charge will completely drain the battery and, in some cases, batteries that have been left drained for some time don't hold charges too well.

You might try leaving it pluffed in and reset the pram on a restart. Hold down command, option, p & r keys while restarting.

This might seem dumb, but did you reload the OS? In some cases it's just as easy to reload the OS and see if the problems go away. Do an archive and install (or clean install in os9) if you don't want to lose snaything. One test is to see if the machine will restart from the os cd consistenetly. If yes, it's most likely a software problem.

Another problem could be that, due to the age of the machine, some of the os updates might screw things up. If the machine worked fine without them, you can skip them.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[arjena]

I will try to start from the original OS 9 cd that came with computer. See if it stays on longer than half an hour...
The battery is in tip top shape. I charged it about three weeks ago and it is still 75 % full according to the leds on the back. (I cannot recharge it at the moment because I broke the DC-board last time I put the machine back together again. I will order a new one but there has to be at least some hope that the computer will once again work...)

Tnx,

A

 

[Kitzos]

I had the same problem with an ibook G3 800Mhz dual USB.
It worked fine and then one day it did not want to start. I did a PMU reset but nothing. It would power up after sitting there for two days or a week. Then I took the ibook apart to check the logic board and I notice that there's a battery (like the CMOS battery on PC) soldered on motherboard. I noticed that there was some leaked black goo. I took the black plastic covering the battery off and cleaned up the goo and added solder to the points. After doing this the ibook started right up with the power adapter. THen attached battery and started to charge. I left it on all night and never turned off. Still working now. Hope this helps a little.