[petrol]

Hi,

My Mom has an old 233 MHz PowerBook G3. I forget which exact release it is, but I think it's the second edition (the first release that was not in the same enclosure as the PowerBook 3400 or whatever). If memory serves, this is the oldest laptop capable of running OS X.

My Dad installed Jaguar on this machine, and since then it has the problem that the screen dims very dark (I would say 95 to 98% dark) on startup, while the boot window is loading OS X components. Since it's started doing this, it has become impractical for my Mom to use beyond as a file server when plugged into her AppleTalk network.

Does anyone know off the top of their heads what's causing this, or have any ideas of things I should check out? The only things I've determined so far is that changing the color depth and desktop resolution does not make the screen become bright again.

Thanks,
Phil.

[ibook_steve]

Either the backlight is turned down or the backlight itself is dead. If the backlight is dead, you'll have to replace the whole LCD. First make sure the backlight is OK by adjusting the brightness. If that works, then you should be fine. Otherwise, it probably isn't worth it to replace the screen on that machine.

Steve

[petrol]

Originally posted by ibook_steve:
[B]Either the backlight is turned down or the backlight itself is dead. If the backlight is dead, you'll have to replace the whole LCD. First make sure the backlight is OK by adjusting the brightness. If that works, then you should be fine. Otherwise, it probably isn't worth it to replace the screen on that machine.

Thanks for the reply.

The screen looks fine right as the computer is turned on, and it's showing the gray apple logo on the light gray background. Then while it's showing the OS X startup panel and shows the status bar loading system components it goes dark.

After playing around with it for a few minutes, I noticed that sometimes when I press the brightness button, it all of a sudden gets light again, but this doesn't happen all the time.

My mom swears this only happened once OS X was installed on it.

I'm sure it's not worth to replace the screen, but I don't think she'd be too willing to buy another Mac after the problems she's had with this PowerBook.