[nbk3ad2]

Hey Guys,

I'm in a real bind here. I'm new to this forum so hopefully you can help me.

I have a powerbook g4 12" still running Panther 10.3.9 (i know... i know... ) Anyway, I have been using this laptop and connecting to my other imac and the internet for over a year using a wireless dlink router with absolutely NO issues. All of the sudden today i opened up my powerbook and logged in and my bluetooth and airport icons don't exist in the Finder bar. Also, it wont give me battery percentage and if I mouseover that area of the bar, i get the beach ball. everything is sooooo slow like the mac's trying to work out what's wrong. when i finally get system preferences to open and click on network, it's yellow and tells me it's connected to my network, but that it does not have an IP address. What's going on? I am on my imac now using the same router wirelessly and everything is flawless. any help would be awesome!

[seanc]

Check the S.M.A.R.T status of your hard drive in Disk Utility, if it's dying it'll be struggling to do everything and you should backup all of your important files immediately, although you should already have backups anyway.

[nbk3ad2]

seanc,

thanks for the reply - I'm a relatively new mac user and not quite sure about all the utilities. After plugging the powerbook in for awhile and rebooting, everything now works just fine. I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but does the battery condition matter? My battery is pretty much shot and I have to keep the computer plugged in all the time. My wife had accidentally unplugged it for a day or so and I had these problems when I tried to boot back up the first time. Is this related?

Also, you mentioned disk utility - is that something I should run often? What am i looking for? are there any other utilities I should be keeping up with?

thanks

[seanc]

Disk Utility is like the disk management tool in Windows. In Disk Utility you can repair permissions (which is a good idea occasionally). It also displays information on your hard drive such as the S.M.A.R.T status which is a feature built into hard drives to warn on impending failure.

Disk Utility can be found in the Applications>Utilities folder.

The fact that the battery is dead, could mean that your PowerBook wasn't shut down properly last time it was used and things got a bit messed up.

The other possibility is that your PMU (Power Management Unit) got confused because of your dying battery and the battery meter crashed/got confused and couldn't load, thus holding up other things.

You could try resetting your PMU, I can't remember how to do it, but a Google should bring up pages on Apples site telling you how to do it.

Good luck.