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Severe Powerbook 12" Problems
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jul 2004
Status:
Offline
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I'm a compsci major at UT Austin. I bought a Powerbook 12" in May '04 for school. 12", 1.33ghz, 768MB RAM, 80gig. For my first 2 years in college this thing was a beast... very fast on both OSX and linux.
The past few months have been radically different... the thing is slow as molasses now. It crashes daily, sometimes more than once a day... firefox is one of the main culprits, but the system hangs and dies frequently as well. Programs that used to open in under 10 seconds now take minutes (yes, minutes) to load on some occasions.
I know I need a new PRAM battery (the system forgets the time on every startup now) but I don't think that's the source of slowdown. I've reinstalled OSX 3 times in as many months, with no improvement whatsoever. I thought I might have a memory problem... so I ran a couple of memory tests on it... everything looked fine.
Has anyone had similar problems? Any other things I can try? I'm pretty frustrated with it, and am waiting till I can afford something new this summer, but I'd like to have a working laptop again. Thanks.
Mike
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
Status:
Offline
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Try taking out the memory and see if the problems persist.
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Moderator  Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Offline
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Sounds like the drive may also be on the way out.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Memphis, Tn. USA
Status:
Offline
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It is not a PRAM battery.... You don't have one!
Macintosh Model System Battery Backup Battery
PowerBook G4 (12-inch 1.5GHz) 661-3233 n/a
PowerBook G4 (12-inch 1.33GHz 661-3233 n/a
PowerBook G4 (12-inch DVI) 661-3233 n/a
PowerBook G4 (12-inch) 661-3233 n/a
I would check to see that your main battery is charging and then backup data and reformat harddrive, reinstall OSX.
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Senior User
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: San Jose
Status:
Offline
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Did you boot in single-user mode and use memtest to test the RAM? The Apple-provided hardware test disk is another decent diagnostic, if something's screwy with your logic board. Finally, hard drive failure is a rather common problem, and is frequently associated with slowness and odd crashes. If you've got an external firewire disk (very useful for backups) that you can install onto, you can quickly determine if the internal hard drive is at fault.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: brooklyn ny
Status:
Offline
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it sounds like what happened to my 12" 1.33g powerbook, just before the hard drive died.
BACK IT UP, and get it checked out...
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"At first, there was Nothing. Then Nothing inverted itself and became Something.
And that is what you all are: inverted Nothings...with potential" (Sun Ra)
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