PowerBook G4 Titanium

[iMac600]

For members who frequent the IRC channel, you've probably heard me babbling on about this endlessly already. Due to my absence from these forums I wasn't able to post about this sooner. So I apologise to those folks, but i'm about to do it again. Since so many of my past liberations have a story attached, it should come as no surprise that this is no exception. It's a tale of neglect and sadness, a fresh start and love at first sight.

Well, kinda.

I'd taken my iBook back in for another "teardown and rebuild" due to fractured solder joints on the PMU chip once again. The surgery had succeeded, for the 56,317th time, but it did raise some questions about the dependability of this machine for my future needs. Not to mention it had a huge bow in the case from the new shim inside. I set it down on a table and kicked back in a chair, relaxing, the usual. As I reclined back something caught the corner of my eye, a glimmer of silver lying amongst the pile of broken hardware and scrap components.

Naturally I was intrigued and began to inquire about the slab of steel, sitting face down on the carpet floor. He picks it up and hands it to me, and says "it won't power up. No fans, no chime, nothing. Battery's dead as well, see?", pressing the small button on the battery itself to not a single LED responding. "If you can get it going mate, you can have it." So I took it over to the workbench with the charger, opened the lid and behold, it's a PowerBook G4 Titanium. I spun it around, connected the charger and pressed the power button.

Nada. Dead as a rock.

Lifted the keyboard off and pressed the internal PMU reset button, to no avail, the machine still would not boot. I looked at the charger for a moment and possibly a brainwave forced me to turn around to ask-

"Have you tried a different charger with this?"

"Yep, still nothing."

"Pass me an iBook one anyway."

So he hands me this iBook 45w charger, I plug it into the back and hit the power button. The PowerBook G4 screamed into life much to the surprise of the other technicians in the office, who had spent 2 years with this machine sitting there collecting dust, not thinking to try it with an iBook 45w adapter (although they claim they did, clearly they hadn't, otherwise it would have been in use again much sooner). However a deal was a deal, they were still glad to honour it having since bought MacBook Pros for themselves, so I walked away with a PowerBook G4 Titanium that day.

Specifications

867MHz PowerPC G4 Processor w/ 1MB L3 Cache

512MB PC133 SDRAM

40GB Hard Disk

32MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 Graphics

15.2" Widescreen LCD

Mac OS X 10.4.11

Not only that, their initial mis-diagnosis of the battery was also due to the charger. May I say right now that this machine has 150 cycles on the battery and still holds 4243mAh, which equates to roughly 3.5 to 4.0 hours of battery life.

Photo

It does have a few cons, the lower left corner of the LCD has a slightly brighter spot, although it's still perfectly usable and viewable. Additionally the machine has a crack in the lower left corner of the palm rest with some warping of the titanium from where it was once dropped. Apart from this the machine has none of the typical TiBook Paint flaking, and the hinges are still perfectly smooth and have almost no stiffness whatsoever (although for precautionary reasons i've repacked each hinge with Nulon L90 Anti-Seize grease).

So there we have it folks. PowerBook G4 Titanium. Liberated. I give you my word that she's in safe hands from here on.

 

[iamdigitalman]

LUCKY!!

Shove Leopard onto that, it will just barely fit. Or keep tiger, it's a nice OS still.

Hope someone hands me something like that one of these days. I'd be perfectly happy with a 400mhz unit.

 

[iMac600]

LUCKY!!
Shove Leopard onto that, it will just barely fit. Or keep tiger, it's a nice OS still.

Hope someone hands me something like that one of these days. I'd be perfectly happy with a 400mhz unit.

Leopard rolled just fine on it, but added some unnecessary strain on the system resources. I dropped it down to 10.4.11 a few days ago.

Very nice machines. I noticed the body does like to flex a fair bit, which isn't really a concern (as the board is mounted to an internal sub-frame, unlike the iBooks), but overall it's a great system.

 

[Christopher]

iBook boards are on a subframe as well...

 

[iMac600]

iBook boards are on a subframe as well...

Well I just opened the iBook, and i'll be chuffed, there is. Albeit not a very good one. I suppose it goes around the board and has a single supporting bar through the center... either way, it works.

Still not concerned about the TiBook body flex though. The machine's designed to take a bit of it.

 

[Christopher]

you should do an xbench on your quicksilver and tibook. I'd be curious on the differences.

 

[Temetka]

Nice score.

May she serve you well.

 

[iMac600]

Well, i'm quickly learning that she doesn't like heat. Try and rev it up for too long playing intensive OpenGL stuff and it'll play just fine, but once that chip starts roasting, the graphics begin distorting.

Then again, computer components generally don't like heat, so...

 

[joshc]

If the Titanium is anything like the Aluminum 12" inside, then Apple will have used thermal pads on the heatsink/CPU/GPU instead of thermal paste which is much more effective. It might be worth disassembling to check that out.

 

[Christopher]

You could use G4FanControl. I found that it was free but now is requiring payment....

 

[iMac600]

If the Titanium is anything like the Aluminum 12" inside, then Apple will have used thermal pads on the heatsink/CPU/GPU instead of thermal paste which is much more effective. It might be worth disassembling to check that out.

Spot on. I'm sure this could use something like Arctic Silver.

G4FanControl is a paid application, but I think I still have the freeware version around somewhere which otherwise works fine.

 

[register]

Congratulations! I use two TiBooks, too. Better keep it running Tiger, which is a perfect match for this machine. When using Leopard, you might notice that things like QuickLook like to run with some more cubic inches. Tiger always gives you the benefit of supporting a huge lot of older Software you already have in use. Leopard is more like an option, if you need to use Leopard-only software. But of course you could throw in a bigger HDD and install multiple OSes to choose from at startup.

 

[Franklinstein]

If the Titanium is anything like the Aluminum 12" inside, then Apple will have used thermal pads on the heatsink/CPU/GPU instead of thermal paste which is much more effective. It might be worth disassembling to check that out.

Spot on. I'm sure this could use something like Arctic Silver.

They don't use thermal pads on the processor: they use some weird solid junk that's applied like normal thermal paste, but that hardens and is difficult to remove. On the TiBooks where I needed to remove the logic board, it required some effort, as that heat transfer stuff had adhered to both and refused to let up. Apple's Service info recommends using a razor blade to scrape the solid stuff off of both the contact surface of the processor and heat sink before applying more and reassembling.

The GPU and system controller/northbridge/whatever both use thermal pads, though.

The solid heat transfer stuff and the thermal pads were used because of differences in manufacturing: often the heat sink and the contact surface of the chips wouldn't fit perfectly, leaving gaps that a normal paste couldn't overcome. So, it's best to just make sure that the pads or that solid stuff aren't broken down or anything, rather than to remove it and replace it with paste. If you're having issues with graphics, maybe bend the contact surface of the heatsink down slightly and make sure that there isn't a build-up of dust or anything.

 

[register]

As for the solid heat transfer stuff I found the same as Franklinstein. Do not disassemble this compound if not necessary. You would have difficulties to reassemble it as good as Apple did. In one case I used an electrical insulating thermal grease (Alumina based) after some PCB surgery. The fans have more and longer duty cycles, since.

 

[Byrd]

Nice score iMac 600. I scored a PB Ti 867 a while back too, now specced to 1067Mhz overclock 1GB/120GB HD. The fans do fire up frequently, and if anything I'd say if you're getting graphical corruption to blast the fans with an air compressor, relube them with sewing machine oil. If all else fails, you could always downlock the ATI Radeon chipset using ATIaccelerator.

JB

 

[didius]

Nice catch!

Looking at the pictures, it seems to be in great shape! (Which is pretty rare on the TiBooks)

My main mac is still a TiBook 800Mhz, and it's a great machine (running Tiger)

 

[iMac600]

Cheers guys, and yes she's still in great shape. Unfortunately it's now out of action as both my 45w and 65w AC adapters went "Boom" last night (not the fault of the TiBook, just bad coincidental luck). I don't have the cash for another AC adapter at this stage, but i'll keep it around until I manage to secure another one.

As for the GPU, I do have it downclocked with ATIccelerator which seems to help. I'm almost certain it's a heat issue, so i'll try giving the fans a clean and oil at some point.

 

[macgreg]

iMac600, will a power supply that works with an iBook 500 work for you?

If so, I have one you can have.

PM me.