Then, another SE that wakes up immediately after being put to sleep (but will sleep ONCE after a PMU reset before exhibiting the same behavior), doesn't recognize its internal RAM module, and when it comes back from sleep, brightness doesn't work as expected. I wonder if it's related to those caps?
Weird - my blueberry non-SE 300MHz board does a lot of this too. It's had the supercap violently ripped out by a past owner, so I wondered if that might be related.
My blueberry board has the following problems:
- Will not stay in sleep, as you describe
- Does not see the soldered RAM, only the SDRAM slot RAM.
- Will chime but only display a black screen, and not boot on WARM boots. So, if I shut it down then try to start it again. If I unplug power for a minute then try again, it starts up.
And more recently, it's developed a weird issue with the hard drive where it will sound like power for the drive is cutting out intermittently, and it will of course not boot from it. Eventually if I try enough, it will act normally then boot from it. I don't know yet if it's a bad drive or the logic board but I have a bad feeling that it's the logic board given the nature of the problem.
I do think it's not just caps - these Clamshell boards seem to have some common problems with no known case. Another I've run into on two boards is that they'll not spin up any hard drive, power pins must just be dead. One came to me that way and the other developed the problem after a hard drive upgrade, I believe caused by a short somewhere (probably to the metal shielding) as I smelled magic smoke when it happened.
The problem is that we don't know yet what components are at fault for these sort of problems so we can't fix them. None of them seem to be very difficult fixes, probably just a chip that fails, or something else that can be repaired. Just takes someone with the troubleshooting skill, which I don't yet have.