Someone help please, major issues 10.5.2 power

Question

Alright, this all started with 10.5.2, and I've already been to the apple store once. 10.5.1 was running pretty good.. had a few problems but nothing major.. upgraded to 10.5.2, and issues have slowly escalated.
Issues.
1. wouldn't boot with my cinema display plugged in for the first week after I upgraded. even after reseting pram. then all the sudden it began working properly.
2. the green light on my charger cord lights up at about 1/10th it's usual brightness.
3. my battery, that had 14 cycles, and was only 7 months old, went from having 95-96% health before I upgraded to 10.5.2, to 60% health a week later. (so low in fact that apple kindly replaced it with a new one at the apple store, he even agreed that it was incredibly low for the cycle count. but unfortunately I believe the problem lies elsewhere).
4. I noticed there was something wrong with the battery because when I was running off of it, it would run down to about 48% and just flat turn off with no warning, actually causing a loss in a couple files. I haven't tested this with the new battery yet as I'd like to do some research (this) first, and frankly try to figure out what else could be going on.
5. this is another major one, I can't put my computer to sleep because, sometimes it doesn't wake up, and when it wakes up(75% of the time) my external HD fails to work.. what I mean here is that it continually kicks over trying to spin up... and then it says I removed the drive without ejecting it when I didn't.. I know you're thinking this could be unrelated, and hard drives die all the time.. but I assure you this HD is in perfect working order, even according to techtool pro 4. it's only 6 months old, and when I turn it off, unplug it's power and re attach it again, it starts up fine and works again, it's the sleep that's messing it up.
So, that's my main concern, I have 700+ gigs of really important info on my external and I'm afraid it could just get fried somehow.. I can't afford a new external.. has anyone ever heard of these things before? as for specifics, this is a santa rosa macbook pro 2.4 ghz, 2 gigs of ram, a 30 inch cinema display, and a dual bay external hd.
thanks

Answer 1

savager wrote:
Alright, this all started with 10.5.2, and I've already been to the apple store once. 10.5.1 was running pretty good.. had a few problems but nothing major.. upgraded to 10.5.2, and issues have slowly escalated.
Issues.
2. the green light on my charger cord lights up at about 1/10th it's usual brightness.
Did you show this to the people at the Apple Store? This sounds like a hardware problem and appears unrelated to any external hard drive.
3. my battery, that had 14 cycles, and was only 7 months old, went from having 95-96% health before I upgraded to 10.5.2, to 60% health a week later. (so low in fact that apple kindly replaced it with a new one at the apple store, he even agreed that it was incredibly low for the cycle count. but unfortunately I believe the problem lies elsewhere).
This sounds like it could be caused by #2.
Take it back in to the store and try it with a different power brick. I think that might be the problem.