G3 Wallstreet 300MHz--it's dead, i'm stumped!
this part is basically so you have a good idea where i'm at...
I've had this thing since i bought it off my ex's lawyer-friend back in 2003. or was it 2002...? no 2003. anyway, long story short it's suffered two pretty bad accidents amidst other things, and survived them, but has fallen from grace into non-bootableness since around...late 2006. now i'm in my second round of junior college, this time for a goal of A+ certification and more, and it's been a pretty handy dead laptop to have hanging around that i can use to practice the basics of taking apart and putting back together computer components. now i love computer hardware and i'm learning every day, but i'm definitely a novice. was it plato that said the wisest men knew that they knew nothing? it was some old greek guy...lol.
So, my goal here is to find out what exactly is keeping this lappy dead. for background info, the two accidents and other things were:
1. friend spilled coke on it (fixed completely with keyboard replacement, thank god)
2.tripped on powercord and therefore disrupted the female charging port on the d/c sound card, making it wobbly and such...therefore futile without unaided charging (aka won't charge squat w/o a deck of cards or something underneath the powercord plugged in the charging port to keep the thing touching the card) a common malady for g3 wallstreets apparently, from my reading on the subject--even mentioned by others on this forum a few times.
3. burnt-out newer processor. (fixed by replacing with the original processor.)
4.failed dual-boot: i dont know how he got it to work in the end. i at the time wasn't anywhere near as knowledgeable with computers as he was...but my ex had partitioned the hard drive to boot os9 and osX, one on each partition. that was failure at 1-2 attempts before stability.
the lappy did work however, for a surprisingly long time, considering these circumstances all within the first year of owning it.
Now, enough background. Musing:
The batteries do not charge...and are very dead. nothing responds to electricity except the little green LED light near the power button, which sporadically lights up when i plug in and prop up the charging cable, depending on how i adjust it. ive resetted the PMU to death, i remember doing that all the time... also i had a bad overheating problem with that newer processor that used to be in it. i do notice that if the power cable is kept in the right position and i try a PMU reset,i get a steady response of blinking--that little green LED lights up. only for a moment, only after i reset PRAM. and i dont ever hear the fan going anymore when i do that either. none of those happy "i'm alive!" noises i heard accompanying the reset. for now...i'm wondering where to start.try to replace the PRAM battery? but then i read you dont really need it to boot the g3 wallstreet. bad PMU? well...i'd need a fully charged battery to test that, i've read...and i'm fresh out of those babies. for a while i thought, oh, bad d/c-in sound card...but, i would get squat out of that little green LED if it was, i think? since it does not light up, doesn't even attempt a boot, when trying to boot or reset PMU when nothing is plugged into that board(hopefully that made some sense). to me, the green LED is like a little signal. "oh oh i feel electricity, its there" while the obvious nothingness coming from all the other components suggests that....somewhere along the lines some piece of hardware missed the memo.
or maybe...it's just me that missed the memo? lol! help, i'm lost! anyone! anything? words of wisdom! any suggestions and/or guidance would be greatly appreciated. any thoughts at all 🙂
currently: i'm positive i've done this already, but i'm going to leave it plugged in overnight. perhaps...maybe, just maybe, in the morning the little lights on the battery will light up again, even just one! and if i'm especially lucky, i'll get an attempt at booting when i press the power button. something tells me this is pointless though. i dont think this will solve anything...hrm...
sorry so long-winded- i love to be thorough, yet i can scatterbrained, and i also like to write--complimentary combination there. at the least it was an entertaining bit up there! 😀
I've had this thing since i bought it off my ex's lawyer-friend back in 2003. or was it 2002...? no 2003. anyway, long story short it's suffered two pretty bad accidents amidst other things, and survived them, but has fallen from grace into non-bootableness since around...late 2006. now i'm in my second round of junior college, this time for a goal of A+ certification and more, and it's been a pretty handy dead laptop to have hanging around that i can use to practice the basics of taking apart and putting back together computer components. now i love computer hardware and i'm learning every day, but i'm definitely a novice. was it plato that said the wisest men knew that they knew nothing? it was some old greek guy...lol.
So, my goal here is to find out what exactly is keeping this lappy dead. for background info, the two accidents and other things were:
1. friend spilled coke on it (fixed completely with keyboard replacement, thank god)
2.tripped on powercord and therefore disrupted the female charging port on the d/c sound card, making it wobbly and such...therefore futile without unaided charging (aka won't charge squat w/o a deck of cards or something underneath the powercord plugged in the charging port to keep the thing touching the card) a common malady for g3 wallstreets apparently, from my reading on the subject--even mentioned by others on this forum a few times.
3. burnt-out newer processor. (fixed by replacing with the original processor.)
4.failed dual-boot: i dont know how he got it to work in the end. i at the time wasn't anywhere near as knowledgeable with computers as he was...but my ex had partitioned the hard drive to boot os9 and osX, one on each partition. that was failure at 1-2 attempts before stability.
the lappy did work however, for a surprisingly long time, considering these circumstances all within the first year of owning it.
Now, enough background. Musing:
The batteries do not charge...and are very dead. nothing responds to electricity except the little green LED light near the power button, which sporadically lights up when i plug in and prop up the charging cable, depending on how i adjust it. ive resetted the PMU to death, i remember doing that all the time... also i had a bad overheating problem with that newer processor that used to be in it. i do notice that if the power cable is kept in the right position and i try a PMU reset,i get a steady response of blinking--that little green LED lights up. only for a moment, only after i reset PRAM. and i dont ever hear the fan going anymore when i do that either. none of those happy "i'm alive!" noises i heard accompanying the reset. for now...i'm wondering where to start.try to replace the PRAM battery? but then i read you dont really need it to boot the g3 wallstreet. bad PMU? well...i'd need a fully charged battery to test that, i've read...and i'm fresh out of those babies. for a while i thought, oh, bad d/c-in sound card...but, i would get squat out of that little green LED if it was, i think? since it does not light up, doesn't even attempt a boot, when trying to boot or reset PMU when nothing is plugged into that board(hopefully that made some sense). to me, the green LED is like a little signal. "oh oh i feel electricity, its there" while the obvious nothingness coming from all the other components suggests that....somewhere along the lines some piece of hardware missed the memo.
or maybe...it's just me that missed the memo? lol! help, i'm lost! anyone! anything? words of wisdom! any suggestions and/or guidance would be greatly appreciated. any thoughts at all 🙂
currently: i'm positive i've done this already, but i'm going to leave it plugged in overnight. perhaps...maybe, just maybe, in the morning the little lights on the battery will light up again, even just one! and if i'm especially lucky, i'll get an attempt at booting when i press the power button. something tells me this is pointless though. i dont think this will solve anything...hrm...
sorry so long-winded- i love to be thorough, yet i can scatterbrained, and i also like to write--complimentary combination there. at the least it was an entertaining bit up there! 😀
HP/Compaq, Windows Vista
