On the other hand, what is it with beige motherboards dying? I replaced the one in mine twice over the years. Both times the symptoms were a non-booting OS X install, OS 9 booting fine. Tried everything logical, but only swapping out the mobo seemed to fix it.
I have a wild theory, and its an ugly and pessimistic one.
BAD SOFTWARE PROGRAMMING, NOT HARDWARE.
True, salt ions in the air can corrode contacts if you live near an ocean, and true, some capacitors from a certain era on all motherboards will fail because the stolen chemical formula replicated by the chinese taken from japan was missing a key ingredient, affecting all capacitors in the world deriving from that plant... but the reason is BAD SOFTWARE PROGRAMMING, NOT HARDWARE.
How ?
Well OSX likes to set things up for "OpenBoot" a strange and complex set of technologies that was to be a open standard. The try to get their way and tuck stuff in PRAM.
When pram battery charge is off, low, corrupt, whatever, or you THINK you cleared it with Command-Option-P-R at startup with capslock off and watch it double boot.
Well it DOES NOT REALLY ZAP THE PRAM.
Apple is full of assholes that keep squeezing a byte or two of vital non-crc-checked data into the parameter non volatile ram area (PRAM) and putting these unsanctioned new bytes in areas NOT CLEARED EVER by Command-Option-P-R.
result ? bad serial ports that are not really bad !! (i replaced 3 motherboards at 410 dollars apiece before writing a PRAM clearing program to really fix the bug)
Yep ! Many Apple engineers are assholes. They want you to buy hardware whenever they pollute the PRAM. Draining battery and using paperclips will not help. You want all bits zeroed.
YOU ARE IN LUCK! You can repair a dead motherboard by using a PRAM zapper tool not written by apple that clears the DRM areas that contain odometer information (hours your machine used, manufacturing date, etc).
goddamned DRM.
really zapping PRAM should reset mouse and sometimes clock zone and also :
AppleTalk status
Serial port configuration and port definition
Alarm clock setting
Application font
Serial printer location
Key repeat rate
Key repeat delay
Speaker volume
Alert sound
Double-click time
Insertion point blink rate
Mouse speed
Startup disk
Menu blink count
Monitor depth
32-bit addressing
Virtual memory
RAM Disk
Disk cache
Use MicroMat's free TechTool or commercial TechTool Pro to salvage "dead" motherboards that are not really dead, because zapping PRAM is useless using apples methods
I would be less hostile on this topic if I did not have to buy so many motherboards in the past because of the scam.
