Philosophy of the Arts

Technical

Saying goodbye to old Macintoshes

Here I am, sitting staring at two broken fruit iMacs (one Strawberry, one Bondy Blue). The Strawberry is the best of the two; I upgraded it with extra memory and an internal HD, only a year ago.
Four months ago my household was treated with two power surges, one of which cost me a backlight in the cinema display of my G4. A week after I finally decided to buy me a new one, another electrical surge cost me the Strawberry iMac. I never got around to repairing it, until today.
I googled the internet for a remedy, and came up with this:

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the power button lights up when i push it, but won’t even power up. i have had this happen to me a couple of months ago with the power supply exchange program and apple sent me a new power supply.
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my question is, can a power outage just kill a power supply? or is it possible something else is wrong? will i lose my data on my hard disks (i have 4 internal ata’s). i am taking it to the apple store later today, but would appreciate any help before i do.

thanks… tlarkin

08-15-2003, 02:17 PM
I bet its just a corrupt PMU. Sometimes when a mac gets shut off incorrectly (like a power outage) the PMU becomes corrupted. You have a MDD G4 correct? Unplug your G4 from the wall. Pop open your case and in the lower front part of the logic board there will be a little black button. It should say reset PMU on the cirucuit board there somewhere near it. Press it in for just under a second long. Don’t press it more than once. Let it set there unplugged for about 5 to 10 min plug it back in and fire it back up. See what happens.

To me, that sounded plausible enough to give it a try. I found the reset button, pushed it, closed the casket and waited some 20 minutes, to be on the safe side. After that I plugged it in, saw the button light change to orange, heard a pffffft, and dead it was again. The thing is, you don’t just throw away these machines, do you?

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