Saturday, November 21, 2009

Take Your Top Off PowerBook

Apple PowerBook G4 disassembly aluminum DIY PowerBook G4 tear down.

Ok so its not as sexy as someone taking their top off but....

Apple's Aluminum PowerBook G4 15' inch WideScreen you have to admit is a sexy machine (if you are in to those kinds of things :) )

I have been covering a few laptops recently ... and I would be remiss if I did not cover some of the Apple Mac products


Main reason I was opening the chassis on this one is the same reason for the dv6000 and the f730us tear downs. The video chip on the PowerBook this time its an ATI chip set is separating from the system board.. Once the chip heats up and the BGA (ball grid array) flexes the video becomes pixelated and will some times cause the system to freeze up as well.. The iBook's G3 and G4's also suffered from this issue as well. The only fix is replacing the logicboard (ie. system board) or re-flowing the bga.


Here are the Spec's on this one:

PowerBook G4 1.25GHz
OS X Tiger 10.4.11 fully patched and updated
1 Gb ram
15" WideScreen
Super Drive DVD-RW / CD-RW
BlueTooth
2 high speed USB ports 2.0 ready for your iPhone or iPod Touch ... iTunes loaded.
FireWire
DVI out.
RJ-45 10/100 network
WireLess Wi-Fi 801.11 G
80GB hard drive

Technical skill required: This is an easy partial tear down (comparatively speaking) can you take a screw out? if so you can do this...










Here is a screen shot of About This Mac



And here is the PowerBook



Flip it upside down with the battery away from you, I have circled all of the screws you can get to before the battery is out and the memory cover is removed there are 4 long screws along the bottom. and the 4 screws that are holding the memory cover in place.



Using a coin.. I used a dv penny (lol)



The Battery will pop up and you can just grab it and take it out.




once the battery is out you have access to 2 more screws that were hidden under it. and now you can see where the AirPort card is as well.



This shows the battery out and the memory cover off .. under the memory cover is 2 more screws that need to come out .. at this time you can take the memory out as well .. just remember if you are going to test make sure you put at least one dimm back in or you will get the beeps and the blinking sleep light and nothing else.

****Tangent ... also another known issue with the PowerBooks ... the bottom dimm slot has a tendancy to go out as well IMO this is a cold solder joint somewhere too... but have not found that one yet. ****


ON To Part 2 .. NEXT....



WOW Leveling professional power levelers and struggling newbies





For More Great info on Laptop Repair Tips Hit Repair4Laptop.org the author is also the same guy that started tuxmobile.org

To find that long lost friend search4me.ws



2 comments:

hey...the link to part 2 ist broken...keep ending up on the same first page

Sorry about the link It has been fixed. thank you pointing this out.

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