cardinal wrote:
mac-guru's
I have a 800MHz Quicksilver running OS X 10.2 that is randomly powering down. Doesn't seem to be app related as it's happened in lots of different apps and many times when the screen saver is running.
Seems to happen less when I have the case open which leads me to believe that it may be heat related, but at this point that is just a guess.
Has anyone seen or heard of this problem before? It's driving me nuts :-)
The Quicksilver G4 has a CPU cooling arrangement that is VERY vulnerable to dust. My friend had one, started giving her problems after a few weeks. It kept getting worse and worse until she just bought a new one. After several people pronounced the MoBo on her Quicksilver as being dead, it made it's way to me, I was going to mod the case for other purposes.
All I had to do to revive this "dead" Mac was to clean out the huge accumulation of dust in between the CPU heatsink and the heat sink fan. The design of the CPU cooling system draws in fresh air from outside the case and blows it over the CPU heatsink. This air is not filtered in any way. At the area of the interface between the fan and the heatsink, dust coming in through the fan will tend to accumulate between the heatsink fins, cutting off airflow to the heatsink. Remember that an overheated CPU tends to generate seemingly random errors.
Lisa