PowerBook 145B checkboard

[superpantoufle]

Hi all,

I'm the proud owner of a pristine PowerBook 145B, with its stock 4 MB of Ram and 80 MB hard disk, which runs just fine. Today I took the 4 MB Ram card in the dead body of a PB 140 I have lying around, to put it in the 145B and max it out at 8 MB. Everything is fine, but when I cold boot it, I have no chime and the well-known "bad Ram" checkboard on screen. It boots fine after 3-4 quick switching on/off, and the 8 MB are recognised as expected.

Now could the checkboard be caused by a dead PRAM battery? I usually don't bother to change those, since all the Macs I own run fin without one. And a dead PRAM battery is the only "wrong" thing with this machine I can think of.

Any idea? Note that this is just out of curiosity, since the PowerBook otherwise runs just fine, each time after switching it 3-4 times on/off.

 

[Byrd]

Take it apart and reseat the CPU daughtercard; if it continues to play up you may need to add a spacer between the two cards to make them work properly - the usual cause of 1x0 checkerboard issues.

JB

 

[superpantoufle]

Thanks for your answer! The daughter card has been reseated when I plugged the memory card in. Is there enough room for a spacer between the two? It looked pretty packed in there! And what kind of spacer are you referring to?

By the way, I'm posting this reply from said PowerBook, in Netscape 3.1, surfing the web through LocalTalk Bridge running on my PB1400c. So cool! Today I only had to pull the plug once for the 145B to boot fine...