strange powerbook noises

rjbs on 2005-01-10T23:23:04

I'm a little worried about knave. When he's sitting on a flat surface (the desk, the floor, my lap) everything is fine. When I rotate it so the base is not parallel with the floor, it makes a noise. I mentioned this before, but now I know what the noise reminds me of: the sound that hair clippers make when they get jammed. It's also interesting that this noise only occurs while I'm turning the machine. If I hold it at a 45 degree angle with the floor, and keep it still, it's quiet, but if I constantly turn it side to side, the noise persists.

I hope nothing bad happens. I didn't opt to buy the extended AppleCare, which so far has not been a bad thing. I got knave in 2003-07, just in time for OSCON. My original plan was for a two year lifecycle, but lately I've been thinking that it should last three.

It looks like the current direct replacement would run me about $1900; the only upgrade I'd feel like I'd need would be the 512 stick of RAM, which would bring me to 768, 128 more than I have in this machine. I could get a 1G stick, for a gig and a quarter total, which would bring the total price to $2300, well over the price of knave. It would be about 500MHz faster and have twice the storage and twice the VRAM (who cares?). Actually, it looks like I could pick it up with the stock RAM and buy a 1G stick from Crucial for $500, bringing my total to about $2100, a bit over knave's price.

I'd like to see some keen new PowerBook stuff happen, but I'm not holding my breath. Price drops would be nice, speed boosts without price hikes would be nice, and a dual core G4 would be great. Still, the best thing of all would be for this laptop to last until those happens, and then longer.


Moving parts

Phred on 2005-01-11T04:55:32

The only moving parts in a laptop are the hard drive and CDROM, so it sounds like a hard drive problem. Maybe try removing it, then reseating it and see if the problem goes away. Are you getting any drive errors? (not sure how to check that on a mac)

Re:Moving parts

Phred on 2005-01-11T04:56:37

Oh, and also the exhaust fan for the cpu. Those can definitely jam up also from dust.

cheaper memory

lachoy on 2005-01-11T13:53:45

For my 15" PB I picked up a Kingmax 1GB SODIMM from newegg a few months ago for ~US$200 and have been mostly happy with it. I have some sporadic issues with the PB not waking up from sleep mode from closing the lid, but it doesn't seem to happen if I force it into sleep from the apple menu.