Sick Powerbook 17"


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I convinced a friend of mine to buy a Powerbook 17" just before Christmas as a replacement for his PC. He was sick of the Windows world and its related problems, and my big selling point for the PB was that it'd be rock solid and reliable, to say nothing of easy to use.

Well, it's not working the way it should. He bought it at an Apple store in California, and he wanted to upgrade the RAM inside it from 512MB to 1GB. They didn't have any first-party RAM in stock so they sent him to an authorised Apple reseller in the area who sent him back home here to New Zealand with some third-party RAM.

When he went to a local (in NZ) reseller, they told him he had the wrong RAM and gave him _another_ third-party 1GB stick. But apparently at the time, they gave him some story about how the Energy Saver pref. pane wouldn't work as a result, thanks to the RAM.

The reason he mentioned this to me was when I came to look at it today, the machine is behaving weirdly. When we fold down the screen, it does not go to sleep; it just hangs. The screen turns off but it does not sleep, we can hear whirring inside the case where the HDD should be. From here we cannot wake it up unless we do the command-power button thing to shut it down and then power it back up again. Additionally, if he is using it and walks away for a few minutes, rather than going to sleep, it does the same thing - it turns the screen off and becomes unresponsive to any input, as if it were shut down, only the HDD keeps spinning until I do the command-power combo to shut it down.

So if that makes any sense, it looks like going to sleep is a bit screwy. He told me it's been happening ever since he saw the Apple reseller and got the RAM put in.

So it seems to me that the RAM might be causing these problems, especially given the fact that the reseller itself said that it'd cause problems with Energy Saver, but that they had 'tested' it and it should be fine as long as he doesn't 'use the Energy Saver pref. pane'. Does this strike anybody else as very damn weird that an authorised reseller would try to flog off third-party RAM that they know potentially could cause problems in OS X?

Anyway.. what I'm asking here is whether this sleep issue could be attributed to third-party RAM? Thanks :)

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Get out the discs that shipped with it and one *should* be a hardware test cd. You can use that to fully check the RAM and other hardware in the system. MY gf got a bad stick of RAM for her iBook first time around that we had to replace. Things with it acted pretty weird.

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