Repair of the Week

by Matt@Smalldog.com (written by Matt, posted by Ed)

A customer called in describing extremely bizarre intermittent behavior from her PowerBook G4 1.67GHZ 15” computer: whenever she pressed any key, the screen would show that another key was pressed. All macs are capable of using keyboards in any language, with any keyboard layout, so I first checked these settings in the International preference pane. When that checked out, and a good external keyboard didn’t show the problem, I knew immediately that hardware was to blame.

In troubleshooting computers, we often swap in extra parts during diagnosis. It is with these known-good parts that we are able narrow down the problem to a single component (usually). On PowerBooks and MacBook Pros, the keyboard is a separate part from the top case; the top case contains the power button, trackpad, wrist rest, and and speaker grills. Replacing the internal keyboard seemed to fix the problem, so I called the customer to say the machine was ready for pickup. Minutes later, the problem was back, so I tried replacing the top case to no avail. This morning, a replacement logic board arrived from Apple, and it finally fixed the problem for good.

by Matt@Smalldog.com (written by Matt, posted by Ed)