[iREZ]

the light that the plug illuminates has always been orange while charging and green when its fully charged. in the last two weeks, i noticed that the light is no longer orange, but yellow...at first i thought it was my plug (ie. damaged ac adapter), so i borrowed a friends new ac adapter...same thing, then when i used my ac adapter on their machine it showed the normal orange and green. so i narrowed it down to my comp, but why is it yellow? should i take it in to applecare? is it because the battery is on its last leg (1:30 on a full charge) and it's a friendly reminder to get a new batt?...any info will help, im really lost on this.

[seanc]

Thats interesting.

Could you take a picture?

It could be because of your battery but it never did it to me on my old iBook battery.

[aquaslave]

similar issue with me. powerbook owner since 2003 .. nary a problem. out of the blue last week, my charger stopped working .. when i plug the adapter into the powerbook, it would briefly illuminate orange/yellow (im colorblind!) and then no light at all .. and the battery does not charge at all. this is a brand new battery (one month old) and worked just fine until last week.

i dont have applecare .. yeah, i know .. silly me ..
what do you guys suggest i look at? short of trudging up to an apple store?

thanks

[jeffnudi]

Originally Posted by aquaslave

similar issue with me. powerbook owner since 2003 .. nary a problem. out of the blue last week, my charger stopped working .. when i plug the adapter into the powerbook, it would briefly illuminate orange/yellow (im colorblind!) and then no light at all .. and the battery does not charge at all. this is a brand new battery (one month old) and worked just fine until last week.

i dont have applecare .. yeah, i know .. silly me ..
what do you guys suggest i look at? short of trudging up to an apple store?

thanks

I had a similar problem with my charger. The wires inside the cable broke, and I had to replace it. When I plugged it in, I could hold the cable just right, so that the wires made a connection, but when I let it go, the connection broke.

[JoshuaZ]

Man... I never even knew they changed colors. Darn color blindness.

[iREZ]

the colors go yellow, orange, and green...trust me that in real life the yellow seems more yellow and not as close to green as this picture indicates, and even though the colors are similar you still could see the difference between the yellow and green, least i can. sorry for the blurry picture, but its only a color light thread, not picture quality thread .

[robisconfusedd]

mine does the same thing but then it turns red..... still charges but its red, then turns yellow and then green when its done, i havent figured out why it does this yet either, kinda buggin me

[iREZ]

the orange wasnt my powerbook but a friends...mine doesnt turn orange at all...i just posted all the colors so that people here could see the difference. can anybody say why this is happenin?..i really dont wanna go down to the apple store...just seeing a nano or new ipod could be detrimental to my wallet.

[spiff72]

I noticed mine does something odd recently, also...

Dull orange = charging
Green = charged
Bright Orange = cord is being pulled down

I just noticed that pushing the cord down slightly makes the light come on in a brighter shade of orange, whether it is charged or charging...

I took some pictures but I don't have a way to host them.

[spiff72]

Green:


Dull Orange:


Bright Orange:

[Sourbook]

That happened to me about a month before my Powerbook quit on me. New power-manager, logic-board and fan later, it was fine. Thank god for Applecare.

[iREZ]

i think i got what spliff has...holding down the wire gives me the same results. i gotta start backin my stuff up just incase my powerbook does take a dump.

[spiff72]

Originally Posted by iREZ

i think i got what spliff has...holding down the wire gives me the same results. i gotta start backin my stuff up just incase my powerbook does take a dump.

My wife's 15" doesn't do it, but the cord has to be fully seated or the light won't come on. Mine is far more forgiving if the plug gets pulled slightly out.

Glad I just bought a 300GB firewire drive. I have both of our machines backed up on it, with about 100GB left for HD video recording.

Sourbook: Why the name? Did that experience "sour" you to the powerbook?

[davebl]

is there any reports of failing power jacks on the pb's?

[I was David B.]

Originally Posted by davebl

is there any reports of failing power jacks on the pb's?

This sounds absolutely harmless to me.

Maybe there is a circuit inside that measures the charging current and adjusts the color of the light accordingly. Either the circuit specs have changed with time or the response of the light (diode?).

This will affect neither the persistence of your data nor the charging or the power supply of the computer.

[iREZ]

are you talking about the powerbook itself or the ac adapter? i find it very lame that my powerbook is doing this...i'm going to go to an apple store sometime this week to see if i could get this fixed.

[iREZ]

time to take this serious for all users who experience this. i just had two seperate incidents today with my powerbook and ac adapter (once when plugging in, and once when unplugging) and my powerbook totally tripped out the first time, ie. just a bunch of colorful static on screen, and the second time it just shut off and stayed shut off for 5 min whether battery was in, or out and when my comp came back to...it was reset as if i had done a pmu reset. this babies goin to the apple store soon, i suggest back up plans now.

[iREZ]

oh no....now any ac adapter is not working, this batt life is all i have left....cccrrrraaaaappppppppppppp. take warning.

[Big Mac]

I love my iBook 466, but right now I'm having PB envy.

[spiff72]

Hey all...

(Note that I wanted to post a new topic for this, but I have been trying for about 18 hours to start a new thread here...)

I have been having some strange problems for the last couple of days with my 17' powerbook (latest non-high res version - Rev D I think)...

When I sleep it overnight (or for any amount of time, for that matter), it tends to shut down. I also have noticed that when it is supposed to be charging, the time remaining until charged is being reported as "calculating", or I have seen it show ever increading times (starting around 3:30, and climbing as high as 15 hours to go).

I also run "X Resource Graph" all the time, and it shows battery stats all the time in a bar graph. At one point, it gave a message like "battery not found". When it did that, I pulled the battery out (while it was plugged in), and reinserted it. This got it to recognize the battery, and it appeared to start charging again. After a while, the time climbed up again, and eventually the battery "disappeared" again.

While I was watching the battery time left to charge, I tried to call applecare (around 8:45 pm EST). I got put on hold for what was supposed to be 15 minutes or less. Well, 25 minutes later, the indicator in the menu bar said "Charged". I thought this was odd, so i pulled the plug to see if it was really charged. It seems to be working just fine now....I hung up the phone in frustration. I suspect it will happen again, though...

Has anyone experienced something like this?

Do you think that these issues might be related to the light situation? I am also curious whether this might be related to the latest airport and OS upgrades...

I also tried resetting the PMU - and so far so good - but it hasn't been through another charge cycle yet.

Thanks!

[jamil5454]

Originally Posted by iREZ

oh no....now any ac adapter is not working, this batt life is all i have left....cccrrrraaaaappppppppppppp. take warning.

Maybe it's acting weird because you've been messing with it so much.

[iREZ]

how have i been messing with it, i havent done anything too out of the ordinary with this other than reset the PMU and PRAM?...its working again, but every now and then it wont recharge. this is thoroughly frustrating, and i know a visit to the apple store will be a waste seeing how i cannot reproduce the problem. the only thing i could show them is they yellow light thats supposed to be orange. imma wait till it dies completely before taking it in.

[iREZ]

ok...it went kaput. either my ac adapter is broken, or my powerbook is toast. im glad i backed up a week ago. it would work and stop working for the last month but i had finals and needed my computer, but now that there's no school its time to bid adieu to my baby. ill post back as to what the problem is with the yellow light and what exactly was replaced/fixed in my book, that is if anybody cares.

[spiff72]

Originally Posted by iREZ

ok...it went kaput. either my ac adapter is broken, or my powerbook is toast. im glad i backed up a week ago. it would work and stop working for the last month but i had finals and needed my computer, but now that there's no school its time to bid adieu to my baby. ill post back as to what the problem is with the yellow light and what exactly was replaced/fixed in my book, that is if anybody cares.

Thanks for the update. I sent mine in for a bad battery a month or two ago, and they didn't care about the orange, yellow (or bright orange), green behavior. I didn't describe this over the phone very well, but I made detailed notes about it (complete with pictures/thumbnails) right on the desktop of the machine. I thought maybe they would replace the logic board to fix this (if indeed there is a problem).

I noticed that when I push down on the plug (as I described earlier), if you do it for more than about 10 seconds, you can feel the plug gets noticeably hot. Perhaps something is shorting internally when this happens....

I am anxious to hear what they do to fix it.

Thanks,
Jeff

[iREZ]

ok so i took my book in yesternight and i was told that the reason it's yellow is because of the capacitor in the AC adapter? but when she plugged it into their powerbook, it showed up fine in orange? then she proceeded to explain how the slot (i dont know the name) where the adapter gets plugged into was sorta damaged because it shouldn't move around (she then proceeded to push it in a lil to show me). then she claimed it was my battery, 377 cycles and it takes only 15 to fully charge from dead. she told me if i got a new battery, the problem will cease, but i explained to her that if its the battery, shouldn't the problem not present itself if i take the battery out and run off the mains? she then gave me this shpeal about it being the battery, so i had them send it in for another problem (trackpad was peeling up) and told her to put down the battery, the yellow color, and the fact that it doesnt charge sometimes in the report as well.....we'll see what ends up happening. im pretty certain im gonna get back my book as is, and im gonna have to do this allll over again untill i find a genius that'll actually listen to me instead of waiting for their turn to talk.

[iREZ]

for those who care...i got my powerbook back and it's cured!!!!! the light is now orange when its recharging and green when its charged. the part they fixed according to the report they gave me is as follows:

630-4001 PCBA, DC-IN, PBG4 12.1

the genius who helped me assured me it was the battery, im soo glad i didnt give up on the problem being one that was internal. basically if youre getting a yellow light instead of the orange, take ur ac adapter out and press the ac port. if it moves easily it's damaged and should be taken in to get repaired. my baby is back!!!!

[Sijmen]

It also turns red, don't try to get that color, it's probably not healthy

[spiff72]

So from that part name/number, would it be safe to say that it isn't the entire logic board?

[iREZ]

i would think so...