Dead iBook G4 - need help

[LCGuy]

So one of my customers called me last night. Recently she was using her iBook G4, and then she shut it down and went to watch TV. She came back and powered the machine up, and heard a hissing sound coming from the machine. Other than that, the machine was dead. She then unplugged the machine and tried again, and nothing happened. She hasn't been able to power up the machine since. Its a 12" iBook G4 1.2 Ghz. First thing I thought of was the graphics chip problem, but the thing is, my mate had that issue with his iBook, and at least with his, the fan still came on and the machine still showed signs of life. I haven't seen this machine yet, but apparently its completely dead.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Gil]

AC Adapter, Battery, DC board? Power problems should be checked first.

 

[Franklinstein]

I haven't really experienced that before, really, and I've been through several of the G3 models. However, I did have two that did something similar to that.

First was a 700MHz G3 model. It worked, but would emit a loud whistling sound from underneath the trackpad. I'm pretty sure it was either a bad capacitor or maybe a bad inductor. I dunno, I used that one for parts.

The other was an 800MHz G3 model. It would turn on when it wanted, which wasn't very often. It was undoubtedly a power issue, but instead of playing find-the-bad-microscopic-SMT-device, I replaced the board. This was after I hunted for cold solder joints and outright bad components. Finding none, I decided it wasn't worth it to continue searching for something with so many possible culprits.

Both of those boards lacked the GPU problem, so it was unfortunate that they were bad. It wasn't all lost, though, as they both had the major ICs removed via heat gun; they're all now nice decorations.