The Case of the Curious Airport Card
I had the strangest of problems with my powerbook the last couple of days. My poor aging Aluminum Powerbook 1.5ghz (1st Revision) has been working flawlessly for me for years, despite being fairly thrown about the place, onto airplanes, on trains, trams, cars, hotels…. you get the idea. Apart form a hard drive failure about a year ago, the machine has never really given me any trouble.
Until last Sunday Night.
I was reading my email when suddenly I suffered a kernel panic. “This is odd” I thought, as I never have kernel panics. Figuring it was just a once off I rebooted and a few minutes later, again when opening mail: kernel panic. At this point Im starting to get worried. What’s worse, when I rebooted it only went to a blank screen. This definitely isn’t good. I doubted it was a ram problem, as I would have experienced bad ram before now, and also, if it wasn’t even booting it hadn’t even got to filling the ram to crash it. Anyway, I reset the power management and managed to get it to boot into single user mode. So I repaired the disk (which had become damaged) and deleted the caches (hey, it couldn’t hurt). Everything seemed fine. Until the next morning when I opened my laptop up from sleep and boom – kernel panic. “God damn m**&£@££ f%^& son of a bitch”
Having recently suffered a drive failure on my iMac’s back up drive the last thing i needed was to have my powerbook die. Again I couldn’t get it to reboot. This time the power management trick didn’t work. I swapped the ram to the top slot. Nothing. Took the battery out. Nothing. Each time it would chime and then black screen.
So on a hunch (and because I was curious about the little slot in the battery bay of the powerbook) I removed the airport card. Booted first go. Strange. So I shut down and put the airport card back in. So far all things are good. I do remember hitting my powerbook off something the other day by accident, so perhaps that dislodged the card slightly. Anyway, fingers crossed that it has solved the kernel panic issues. If anyone reading this has ever experienced any similar problems please let me know or comment below.
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