oh crap

It looks like my 15” Titanium Powerbook G4, Sugar Daddy Mac, age 21 months, passed away today. Needless to say, I am slightly less than thrilled about this. If anyone can offer some advice on this (i.e. perhaps it’s just mostly dead, to quote Billy Crystal) I would really appreciate it.

Here’s what happened. I was home earlier tonight, I use my laptop to check the weather. I shut the lid, and it goes to sleep. I head off to a coffee shop (same as I usually do) to work on iRooster. I pull the laptop out and try to bring it out of sleep mode. Nothing happens. I write this off as a fluke and decide to read a book instead. I get home tonight, try it again, and still nothing happens.

I remove the battery, toggle the reset button on the back, plug the computer into AC power, and try again. This time, the screen lights up. The computer runs just long enough for me to back my latest revisions to iRooster to my iPod before it hard locks with the screen still showing my desktop. No kernel panic, no nothing. Just dead. I turn off the computer with its power button, and attempt to resuscitate it. I am able to get it to boot into Jaguar again after a while. I run Disk Utility on the hard drive to see if it’s okay. It is. The computer locks up again a minute later. It is now totally unwilling to turn on, although the battery indicates a full charge (courtesy of the indicator LEDs on the battery), and the power adaptor lights up when it’s plugged in.

Any idea what could have caused this?