Strange P'Book behaviour

[enmo]

Let's see if someone has seen this before:

I upgraded ram in the empty slot of my pbook 17" 1.33, additional 512Mb from Centon. System became very unstable, Kernel panics, freezes, etc. Tested the ram...it was defective.

So I brought the RAM back to the shop and got a new one. Installed it, System Profiler recognizes it, no more crashes, run a memory testing software called Rember, everything ok. So I think "great, got 1Gb working RAM now!!".

Until this morning.

I left the pbook in sleep overnight (as always), connected to power supply and when I opened it up this morning.....NOTHING. I get a blank screen. I hear the fans very silently run in the background and a little HD movement, but nothing happens. The only way to get it working is force a reboot with the power button.

So I am wondering....is this this a RAM problem? I still have a couple of days warranty if I want to return it and get the money back. Have you ever seen this before?

Any thoughts/suggestions more than welcome!!

 

[Sutekidane]

Mine does that from time to time, I don't think it's related to the memory. There was supposed to be a software update to fix the problem, but it still occurs to me sometimes. I just stopped leaving it on overnight and just turn it off at night.

 

[EGT]

This happens to my pb sometimes as well. I'm not sure what the cause is.

 

[Eniregnat]

Ockam's Razor would suggest that it is the ram. Remove it, replace the old DIMM, and see what happens. If your PB runs, great and you know that it is that RAM that is bad. If the PB doesn’t run, then your new RAM might of damaged the computer in some way. The memory is kept on in Sleep Mode, Apple never managed to come up with a working dump to disk, super low power consumption sleep mode. So perhaps being in sleep mode helped root out the gremlens in your memory.


I would suspect that your RAM merchant may not be the best. If your still under Apple Care, your will have to return your PB to it's "purchased" state for all of the warranty to hold. If the memory damaged the logic board or some other component, the damage wouldn't be covered, unless it was the Apple installed memory that caused the damage.

 

[JeDiBoYTJ]

Actually, from what I have heard, the "dead display after wake" problem has to do with the Airport or Ethernet connection. If you turn off Airport, and/or unplug the ethernet cable (if you are using it), that should alleviate the problem.

Also, whenever that happens to me, I just closed the screen and opened it again, and everything worked.

 

[Mechcozmo]

Try running the Apple Hardware Test on both the new SO-DIMM you have in there, and the old one.

Just for laughs, you DID get the right RAM, right?

 

[enmo]

That's it!

Thanks folks, run all the tests (yes, the RAM specs were the correct ones), but after 3 (three!) modules I exchanged at the vendor, neither of them worked.

So tonight I'll go and get my money back. I guess either the PB is very picky on memory or CENTON is not really good at keeping their production specs tight.

I lean more towards the latter, given that they say on the box that this RAM is specifically for G4 PB and warranted for life!!

Thanks for all the suggestions, pity this good deal did not work out!