Powerbook G4 "Fan" Club

Gregory Sigman wrote:
> By which I mean, "I would like to club this G4 until the fans stop
> running."
>
> Allow me to elaborate.
>
> To be perfectly honest, this is not my problem, but one of a friend
> of mine, whom I often help out with computer issues. He's quite savvy
> himself, so I only get questions about the most difficult of
> problems, and this one has stumped me. (I hope it doesn't turn out to
> be simple, now; gee, would I feel sheepish...)
>
> Here's the problem: he has a recently acquired 15" G4 Powerbook (an
> "as is" sale from some surplus liquidator). On the whole, this
> appears to have been just a stellar purchase; the 'book is clean,
> runs very well, screen is bright and sharp, and it even has a working
> battery. Huzzah! But there is this baffling little annoyance:
>
> When you put the Powerbook to sleep, the cooling fan kicks in
> immediately at full blast. Yes, I'm certain that the machine is
> sleeping-- the light pulses as it should, the screen goes dark, et
> alia. It does not get hot when it is sleeping. When you wake it, the
> fan immediately shuts off.
>
> My friend is still quite happy with his acquisition, but I remain at
> a loss as to how to explain this odd behavior. Any ideas?

Try setting things back to factory defaults.

Book with Option-Cmd-O-F held down.
At the prompt type:
   reset-nvram
then
   reset-all

It will re-boot and the firmware will be back to the factory settings.

If the issue is in the power management circuit and not fixed by the above you'll need to reset that. I'd search www.apple.com/support for:
 reset power manager powerbook g4

That should get you the directions.

David

Not a solution but related club-wielding thoughts. I have owned my G4 15" TiBook since new (6 or 7 years) and for the first three, never knew it had a fan. But now it can sit on the desk with the fan going endlessly. It is not asleep but has the PGP screensaver activated.

Being annoyed with the noise and thoughts of premature wear, I do the following; Press the Power Key, then Apple-S. This happily activates the sleep, even behind the screen-saver - something I am unable to do on an iBook 14" 1.07 GHz running OSX 10.5.2. [The iBook won't recognise Apple-S even with full screen access - I have to click the 'Sleep' button. There MUST be a keyboard equivalent, but I haven't learned it! ]

In the interests of being thorough, I'll go check the G4-15" firmware version. ROM rev $77D.45F6 and Boot ROM version 4.18f5 I suspect the latter is the firmware version.

My thought had been that over several years perhaps the circuit board gets a patina of oily residue and a coating of micro-fine dust that reduces the cooling efficiency. Perhaps it needed a spray with some sort of circuit board cleaner? I'd be interested to hear if anyone has done this, as I am a little reticent to try it. Mind you, looking inside, the circuitry looks very pristine to me. Perhaps the virtually dead battery and the no doubt struggling HD generate a lot more heat! Perhaps the newer bloatware versions of office applications just take more processing? However, surely not during sleep!

I suspect the firmware has a great part to play as does the OS version. I run OS 9.2.1 on the TiBook (just for accounting). But experience with an AGP graphics G4-450 showed me that every update of the operating system, left me with various sleep troubles, fixed sometimes, re-appearing next update, new issues occurring, etc. It is now on OSX 10.3.x and will both sleep and wake up, almost all the time, (some things such as a slide show in iPhoto seem to seize it up). It never goes into deep sleep because I have PCI cards that don't support that feature and prevent it. I used to get different results between selecting sleep and letting it time-out into sleep. [That's all another thread, but just adding anecdotal evidence that software OS versions can affect hardware features.]

lists-for-dmi wrote:
> Not a solution but related club-wielding thoughts. I have owned my G4
> 15" TiBook since new (6 or 7 years) and for the first three, never
> knew it had a fan. But now it can sit on the desk with the fan going
> endlessly. It is not asleep but has the PGP screensaver activated.
>
[snip]
>
> My thought had been that over several years perhaps the circuit board
> gets a patina of oily residue and a coating of micro-fine dust that
> reduces the cooling efficiency. Perhaps it needed a spray with some
> sort of circuit board cleaner? I'd be interested to hear if anyone
> has done this, as I am a little reticent to try it. Mind you, looking
> inside, the circuitry looks very pristine to me. Perhaps the
> virtually dead battery and the no doubt struggling HD generate a lot
> more heat! Perhaps the newer bloatware versions of office
> applications just take more processing? However, surely not during
> sleep!

Crud does build up. Even a very light coating will reduce the ability of a heat sink to dissipate heat. And to pull up the heat sink requires some digging on most models. It may be that the heat sink paste that is used to seal the heat sink to the CPU has gotten "less sealed". If you do want to remove the heat sink to clean it you need to make sure you put it back with said paste. Radio Shack should sell it.

But I'd bet that the power logic board is confused. Have you tried resetting it?

Searching for "Powerbook Power Reset" at www.apple.com/support/ will turn up a lot of instructions. Pick out the one for your computer.

David

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 12:27 PM, lists-for-dmi
<lists-for-dmiclear.net.nz> wrote:
> Being annoyed with the noise and thoughts of premature wear, I do the
> following; Press the Power Key, then Apple-S. This happily activates
> the sleep, even behind the screen-saver - something I am unable to do
> on an iBook 14" 1.07 GHz running OSX 10.5.2. [The iBook won't
> recognise Apple-S even with full screen access - I have to click the
> 'Sleep' button. There MUST be a keyboard equivalent, but I haven't
> learned it! ]

The secret is : don't hold down the Apple key, just hit 's' and it
goes to sleep. I believe this changed when we went to OSX, but I'm not
sure.

Christopher Appell
BPG Europe

Good afternoon,

On 13/3/08 at 4:27 AM -0700, lists-for-dmi
<lists-for-dmiclear.net.nz> wrote:

>[The iBook won't recognise Apple-S even with full screen access
>- I have to click the 'Sleep' button. There MUST be a keyboard
>equivalent, but I haven't learned it! ]

Have you tried just 'S'. That works for every machine I've tried
putting to sleep via the keyboard; power key, wait for dialog,
press S.


Charlie