[garydr]

I have been suffering from an unresolved screen blackout problem on my Wallstreet Powerbook ever since I installed OSX in 2002 (pre Jaguar). I am now running Jaguar with 384MB ram.

Briefly, the problem is that when waking the system from sleep, the screen stays dark and will not respond to any attempts to brighten the screen. By shining a lamp on the screen I can see that the system is operating fine, the function keys for controlling screen brightness are changing the setting, but the screen remains dark. The only solution is to restart the computer. Just logging out is not enough.

I have taken the PB in for service, I have reset the pram, rest the power manager and reinstalled the system, all to no avail.

Here is another related behaviour. OS X startup goes through what I will call three stages. The first stage, I see the spinning icon. Second stage, the OS X window appears and displays a sequence of system resources that are starting. Finally, third stage, the login screen appears. What happens on my system is that when stage 2 begins, my screen goes dark. During this stage, no attempt to brighten the screen, using the function keys, will have any affect. However, when the login screen appears, then the brighten screen function key will work.

A final observation, is that at the moment when the screen would go dark near the completion of shutdown, about half goes dark (vertically) and then a moment later it all goes dark.

Well, that describes the situation. Having to shutdown and reboot the PB every time I take it somewhere, which is daily, is a huge pain!!

I hope someone will take up the challenge to help me solve this problem.

Thanks for your patience in reading to the end.

Gary

[toconnor]

Gary,

I too have the same problem with the same machine. What a pain and I don't have a fix yet either...

Todd

[Rainy Day]

Gary,

First off, i too use a WallStreet with 384Mb of RAM. It's a late production (WallStreet II) 14.1" model.

I used to experience a similar wake-from-sleep problem as the one you describe, only it was under MacOS X 10.1. Under 10.2, the problem shifted to hanging on going into sleep, with the same "can see the screen but the backlighting is off" syndrome, except that the computer would not respond to the keyboard, and the clock in the menu bar was frozen.

Now it is important to note that when i installed MacOS X 10.2, i did so with a clean install (only copied over my home folders).

I've never seen any startup screen problems (except there's an ugly transition, which did not occur in 10.1, from the rotating disc-screen to the colorful MacOS X screen, if you want to call that a "problem.")

Now i did track down the source of my problems, at least under MacOS X 10.2. I have a USB cardbus card that i use primarily for an Apple Pro mouse. With the card inserted when the system goes to sleep, i couldn't go much longer than 10 days (if i was lucky) between these sleep-related crashes (only option was to force a reboot).

Since i started ejecting the cardbus card prior to invoking sleep (or when walking away from the Mac), i haven't experienced a single crash. Before, i avoided putting the book to sleep; now i use sleep frequently (again). Been problem free for two or three months now.

If you have any cardbus cards in your book, try ejecting them before sleep. If that doesn't solve your problems, and you have the same model WallStreet, then you might consider a clean install of MacOS X 10.2.

I used to think this sleep problem was due to lack of support of the WallStreet by Apple, but have since concluded that the stock WallStreet is indeed supported by MacOS X. Just knowing that much may be helpful to you. Good luck.