[DM-MUG] PowerBook G4 flickers

[Matt W]

It could be due for some maintenance, especially if you haven't done 
any recently. Ray's on the right track. I also prefer Disk Warrior. 
Good price, great product.

I would suspect the inverter board for the flickering. Kernel panics 
are Mac OS X crashes. They should be rare to nonexistent on a proper 
install with Mac OS 10.3.2 and newer. Frequently related to hardware 
problems, software CAN cause them too. I have created a few by plugging 
FireWire drives in at bad times (while other FW drives are copying 
data, for example) but mostly on older versions of Mac OS X. If you are 
talking about apps quitting, not kernel panics, that's a little 
different and software is probably to blame. No solid tricks here, just 
a lot of permissions checking, update installing, extension and plist 
(Mac OS X preferences) testing.

Matthew

On Jun 29, 2004, at 6:20 PM, Ray Bowler wrote:

> At 12:36 PM -0500 on 6/29/04, John Kisner wrote about [DM-MUG] 
> PowerBook G4 flickers:
>> I have a PowerBook G4.  It's several years old (667 Mhz).  The screen 
>> flickers once in awhile, and I have more crashes than I would expect 
>> with Panther-- but maybe those are MS Word related (which I don't 
>> often use, but have recently to do some edits).  Today I had a new 
>> one: in the midst of browsing web (on Safari) the screen got darker 
>> and I got a message in many languages to hit the power button and 
>> restart.
>>
>
> I have no help on the screen flickering.
>
> The increasing number of crashes indicates some other things may be 
> wrong. The black screen is a kernel panic. A first step to dealing 
> with this is to either startup from a different disc and then run 
> diskutility to repair your disk. If you don't want to do it this way 
> then reboot holding the command key and the s key. It will start up in 
> single-user mode with a black screen. When it finishes you will be a a 
> command prompt. Above it will be some instructions about running fsck. 
> Type in fsck -y and press enter. This will run the same repairs that 
> diskutility does. If when it finishes it says it found problems then 
> run it again until there are no problems. type "reboot" to start up 
> again. When it reboots go to the diskutility in utilities and start it 
> run "repair permissions". These are starting places. If you still have 
> kernel panics or a lot of crashes then more can be done.
> -- 
> Ray
>
> Des Moines, IA Mac Users Group
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