Ibook shutdowns itself.

Question

Dear all.
I need some help in trying to figure out why my ibook is shutting itself down intermittently. There is totally a non- recoverable event. It shutdowns itself any time . What guesses i can make are as follows...please let me know which one it cud possibly be
a) There might be a conflicting update somewhere ...( least likely but i am guessing so coz i belive the problem became more common since i updated the machine with daylight settings..
b) my logic board cud be faulty...
c) there is some heating in the system that's not handled..properly..and when i say not handled properly i mean there might be some part that's getting heated more than usual and this is making machine shutdown ..( might be beyond machine's operating temperature..)
To add to this the machine was showing a very hazy display during some initial days which were very difficult to see..( but if you pay attention very closely you can actually tell what applications are running ..) But this was about 1 month back...Now the machine is shutting it self down..
Has any one seen the cuase and solution or faced similar problem and got it okay by apple ..? Please help me with solution. I would appreciate your suggestions but please no-non serious suggestions..( like have you restarted your machine..kind a...)
Thanks in advance for your time and knowledge.
Best
Anshul

Answer 1

Regarding the battery, the iBook should run just fine with the power adaptor alone. I had one of the recalled batteries and had to send it in. For some weeks I ran off of the power adaptor alone with no issues. Of course, with no battery, I lost the date and time every time I shut off the power because the main battery is what keeps the date and time. There is no other battery to run the clock.
You say that your battery died, but it sounds like it is still in place. Just to eliminate all possibility of the battery having anything to do with your problem, remove it physically and run off of the power adaptor with the battery out and see if your problem persists. Tape some plastic or something over the battery bay to keep it clean while you do this.
Concerning the display, do you have an external display you can borrow--maybe a friend with a desktop computer? It would be helpful to know if your display problems also exist on an external display or only on your built in display. If the external display looks good, then there is likely a problem affecting your built in display. If the external is also bad, it might indicate a problem with the connection of the video chip to the logic board, since you said the video chip passed the Apple Hardware Test.
It sounds like temperature may be a factor here. If your iBook has been off for a while, like overnight, will it work pretty well for a while? Then, as it warms up, will it start to malfunction? If so, you may have a failure of the ball grid array which holds your chips to the board. I experienced this sort of thing with my iBook, but it mostly got very slow and froze. It didn't shut down like yours does. But the underlying cause could be similar.
If you do have a failure of the ball grid array, the only way to repair it would be to have the board reballed. You can often get it to work for a while longer by making and installing some home made shims. A test would be to squeeze the lower left corner of the iBook and see if there is any improvement. If so, it would indicate that this is the problem and you could consider trying some shims, which at least won't cost you anything but some time.
If it does turn out to be a logic board problem such as I have described, it would likely be prohibitively expensive to get Apple to do the repair, as they would likely replace the logic board. I have heard of that costing nearly as much as a new MacBook. It just would not be worth it.
And just to be sure that software is not the problem, have you tried reinstalling the OS? It doesn't really sound like software, but that's something Apple had me do just to be sure the problem wasn't software related.
I'm hoping that some of the more experienced and knowledgeable members of the forum will know what is going on here and comment. From my own rather limited experience, I would suspect hardware problems having to do with the logic board, but I could be mistaken.
Good luck!