The saga of the magical sleeping MacBook 13 from hell continues (part 4)

(For earlier parts of the saga, see herehere and here)

While travelling last week, the MacBook was acting up. It was constantly going to sleep in the middle of work, even with a full battery and while plugged in. Poof. Gone.

And like when I first got it, it would take 30 seconds of fading off into dreamland before I could wake it up to get a few more sentences typed and….poof….gone again. This happened easily 20-30 times over the last day of the conference.

I called MacStation and was advised that this was a firmware update issue. I ran the installer for 10.4.8, it installed the firmware updater, I rebooted and …… nothing. Black screen. Rebooted it many more times. Same thing. Completely black.

Luckily I have an iBook G4 kicking around. I hoped that target disk mode was functional. It was fortunately functional but the video display didn’t come on in target disk mode either. I moved my files to the iBook G4 and kept working for the weekend (remembering both the joys of that lighter iBook but also its speed limitations!)

After a trip to MacStation today where they forced a new SMC update and EFI update (and did it in their usual quick and efficient fashion), it was cleared to go back into duty. Three hours of file transfers later and everything now working fine.

Time to go to work. I’ll just open this file so that I can –––

Poof.

Gone.

Gone to sleep and can’t wake it up.

Oh, it’s awake. And now it’s asleep again.

The little breathing light just breathes peacefully while I curse at this machine.

I guess I’ll be back on the iBook G4 tomorrow.

It’s going back to the shop tomorrow and if they tell me it needs a logic board (it’s third trip into the shop and second logic board swap), I’m done. Apple, I want a new laptop. It’s painfully obvious that nobody knows how to make this lemon not suck. Sheesh.

I’ll leave an update here on the blog.