G4 ibook Black Screen and "Fan of Death"

Question

(Posted last night. Removed for unspecified reasons. edited so is within terms of use and reposted).
My 2nd ibook just died. Treated it like a baby never dropped on it's head or anything, and yesterday it suddenly decided to play up.
So what happened?
Well I'm sitting there with the 12" G4 ibook on my lap and blink the screen goes black, power still on, backlighting still on, but no display. Hmmm.
Ok let's not panic, turned off, waited, then turned on again.
Nothing! No image no start-up, except the rear fans going at MAX SPEED.
Turned it off **** quick. Turned on...same thing Whirrrrrr!
This continues until finally machine stays on. For 2-3 minutes that is, then blink the screen blacks out again, no beachball nothing just off!
Ever since then nothing but the fan! No start-up screen nothing.
So I start reasearching, and turns out a LOT of people have been experiencing the exact same problem. Okay now I'm freakin'
I read more and there it is a website explaining the situation: (link removed in case this is frowned upon).
Suggests there may be a batch manufactured around the same time in late '04 - '05, that have faulty soldering on a chip just to the laft of the trackpad. I don't know but I'm not impressed as I went through this with the G3 ibook this replaced which was part of the batch with the faulty logicboards.
Thankfully Apple eventually acknowledged the problem there and my and other peoples G3 ibooks were fixed, but this time the're saying there's no problem! I am unimpressed.
It's not right that I buy TWO ibooks only to have them BOTH die after a couple of years of careful use. Not right at all!! The ingenious remedy put forward by others with the same problem is applying a lot of pressure to the casing in that spot to force the chip to make a connection to the solder(?!), perhaps even using a clamp to keep it held down.
Guess what I tried it, palm down max pressure, and IT WORKS! Take my hand away and Zzzt screen off and back to square one. The alternative and only official avenue to resolve the problem? BUY A NEW LOGICBOARD?!?!
I have a Mac Mini, iMac and 3 iPods so you know I love you're work Apple, but there are limits to what a person can reasonably put up with! At this stage after being twice burnt with your notebooks I'm VERY hesitant about repeating the mistake.
Finding an email link on your site so I can lodge my issue has proved impossible. Hopefully I'll get a response other than a deletion.
Reading others posts, at present more than 2000 people have enquired about the same problem, and an independant body has verified the problem (complete with macro photos of the cracked soldering), so this is hardly an anomoly! All I want is a sign you are taking this seriously.
Sincerely,
W.Whatford
Australia.

Answer 1

I helped my friend fix his 2 year old iBook that had the same problem.
We found information on the probable cause after doing some Google searching on phrases such as "G4 iBook logic board". It was one or 2 solder joints that had gone bad, connecting a chip to the logic board. It's a 28 pin chip, the Intersil ISL6225 power controller, the suspect pin is most likely #28 and maybe adjacent pins, and maybe #1. If you search around you can find more information.
We decided to try to fix it ourselves. We partly disassembled the iBook to the point where we could remove the bottom half of the white plastic shell case. You can find WWW guides on doing this. We used an old 35mm camera lens reversed to act as a high-powered magnifying glass to study the chip pin solder joints. Using a small soldering iron we attempted to re-solder one of the pins, which appeared to have come loose possibly due to repeated on/off heating cycles or a cold solder joint. We just reheated the suspect solder joints and did not add new solder, as this was the advice on another forum. However the iBook still had the same problem afterward and pin 28 seemed to be loose, although it is difficult to see, you really need a mucroscope.
Then we decided to take the iBook to a friend who had lots of experience repairing small circuit boards. He used a soldering iron and some solder to re-solder several of the chip pins and then used a special "de-soldering" braid wire to remove the excess solder that was now connecting together some of the chip pins. He heated the chip pins for about 5 seconds and was fairly rough with the board in applying pressure. He told us that these small chips can take more heat than you might expect, and the logic boards are strong and it's pretty hard to damage them by bending them a little or by touching a connection.
We fired up the iBook again and it now works! It has been OK for about a week. We're hoping it will last a few more years, or until the next MacBook becomes too hard to resist.
BTW taking apart and later re-assembling the case is tricky and we ended up scratching it up a little at the joint line (there are downloadable manuals that can help with this). But the iBook was dead before and now it works so it was worth it.
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.1)