If you’ve smashed your iPhone and you need a quick reliable place to repair it,  I recommend fixpod. They have the simplest system I’ve seen, you just select your phone model, click on the problem, it gives you a price. You book in your  phone for repair,  and they guarantee to repair it within 24 hours!  You can either drop it in in person, or post it in.  If you want some more views on fixpod check out this forum where there are lots of happy users! Here’s where to find them.

When you have worked your way up the sites, and over the top, the lid will pretty much fall off like this.

These are the screws you need to tighten, there are 4, and the ones on the left are covered by a little piece of yellow sticky tape you need to remove and then replace after you are finished.

The tightening!

That’s it, now carefully put the sticky tape and lid back together, and replace the two screws. It should take about 1/2 hr to an hour.

There is a problem with the logic board in the Macintosh G4 ibooks. It can appear after a year or more in some machines and the symptom is that after being on for a few minutes, the screen goes black (it looks blank, but the light has gone off) , the fan turns on, and the computer freezes. You might think it is a problem with the display but it’s actually a problem with one of the chips on the main motherboard. This article describes the problem and how to repair it.

What models are affected?

I conducted a survey (thanks to over 300 readers who participated!) to see which model g4 ibook had the problem.  The results are here and it appears that every  iBook model can develop the blank display problem.

Thankfully the Aluminium power books don’t have the problem. In fact the powerbooks from this era are a great design, the 15 inch Aluminium G4 powerbook is one of my all time favourite macs – I still have one.

The original 2003 ibook G4′s (800/933/1Ghz) have the fault.

The “Early 2004″ (1Ghz) models up until Oct 2004 have the same motherboard.

The 60G (1.2Ghz) “Early 2004″ model and all the “Late 2004″ model ibooks (1.2Ghz/1.33Ghz) and Mid 2005 (1.33 and 1.42Ghz) have  different logic board (built in airport extreme)-  but they still have the fault – even models with the new logic boards are affected!

What is the fault?

One of the chips heats up and cools down each time the computer is turned on and off, so that eventually a small stress crack appears on one of the pins. When the computer heats up and parts expand, the crack opens up and the power does not get through. This means the display goes blank and the computer freezes. If you press the plastic case of the ibook in just the right place, it can put enough pressure on the chip so that the pin makes contact and the computer will power up again. In fact, here’s a crude DIY repair method involving a shim where you open the laptop and put a piece of rubber on top of the chip to press it down:  http://coreyarnold.org/ibook/?p=20

Here is another DIY solution is that involves clamping a g-clamp onto your iBook – I would not recommend this one it will place all sorts of physical stresses on the iBook internals!

http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/design-fault-in-apples-ibook-g4/

Here is a photo of the fault developing. (from here: ENGF959-orig). You can see the thin black line running below the lead which is a crack in the solder.

I rang Apple and they don’t acknowledge that the problem exists. They have officially ‘never heard of it’.

The repair!

You need a fine tipped soldering iron to heat up the top few pins of the chip one by one and resolder them to the logic board. Press the chip down while you apply a very clean and fine soldering iron tip to each pin.

Don’t attempt this one unless you have had some soldering experience – or you are ready to say goodbye to your G4 ibook if something goes wrong!
Here are some pictures:

The G4 ibook with the bottom case off. The offending chip is circled.

Here is a closeup of where I have soldered the legs of the chip. You can see the base of the top pins are shinier and a little fatter from the new soldering. I soldered the top 3 or 4 pins on each side, but it’s only the top 2 pins that the fault occurs with as they are the main power pins. I applied a little more solder to the joint as well, that’s why it looks a bit lumpy.

TYou don’t need to apply any new solder to the chip. Just apple some solder to your soldering iron to clean it. Then wipe the iron clean on a rag. Then gently touch the iron to the legs of the chip for about 3 seconds each leg to melt the solder down onto the joints again.

Here is a close-up of the chip you are soldering.  Solder the end with the little circle on it. Solder the top 2 legs on each side.

STOPPING THE FAULT FRM OCCURRING

As pointed out in the discussions below, once your ibook is fixed,  or if your G4 iBook has not yet developed the fault, you might want to take out $10 worth of insurance by buying this little app.

It turns your fans on earlier and lowers the internal temp of you ibook. You can set the temperature lower so that your fan turns on a little sooner to keep the iBook cooler.

If you repair your iBook be sure go make a post below. So far there have been lots of successes and no failures at all!

The symptoms of the fault are as follows:

• After being on for a few minutes, your ibook gets a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes.
• You can’t do anything at all except power down the computer by holding the power button.
• You restart and it doesn’t boot up.
• You squeeze the bottom of the computer tightly together just to the left of the trackpad, and it boots up.
• It tends to boot up when it is cold, but then stops working when it warms up.

Here are the results of a survey I conducted here on macintoshhowto.com over a period of 6 months regarding the affected models. It appears all models are affected.

In this article I described the fix for this G4 logic board fault. This survey was to test what models were impacted.

t I have discovered there is an ipod repairer in Australia here is his URL:

http://www.dcoda.com/

Last year I bought 5 non-working ipods from ebay and fixed up 4 of them. It was not to hard, but there was a couple of tricks. I’ve finally found some time to write up the hard bits, just in case anyone is interested, so here goes. This is not for you to try at home, lest you break your ipod!
The hardest part is opening the case.

I found the best tool was part of a stanley knife blade, the type that you break when it gets blunt. You can see the kind of blade I mean in the picture below. Two segments of the blade are carefuly inserted into the side of the ipod, at the angle seen in this picture.

When they are pushed down a little, the metal case opens a little. Then a third can be inserted in the middle. Then add a fourth fifth and sixth in parallel with the first three to force it a little more, the gap opens a little more with each blade inserted, until it finally pops open on one side like this:

Now you insert the blades into the top, above the hold switch and near the headphone jack symbol, careful not to push in too far and damage any wires with the blade. The case then pops open as follows:

The metal back is now separate to the plastic front, but be careful, the headphone jack and hold switch are part of the metal base – have a look at the pictures below.The white square in the red circle is the connector, it needs to be very cafefully prised apart with the knife blade. I used the long knife blade in the first picture above to do this.

Now the plastic case and metal back will separate apart. From the picture below, you can see the hard drive sits on top of the unit. It pivots on the right, but if you pivot it and try to lift it you will porbably break the connector, so you have to carefully insert part of a hacksaw blade (see left photo) in the gap between the HD connector and the main PCB board. Pivot this hacksaw blade down (right picture) and the HD connector will pop open, allowing you to remove it. The third picture (bottom) shows me pressing the connector together as I re-assemble the ipod. The connector is under my pointer finger, it needs to be moved around till it clicks into place, then firmly pressed.

The battery and main board just pull off and there are some small torx screws. There is a little connector that connects to the front that is tricky and needs to be prised apart with a blade, as seen below.

Happy ipod-ing, and I hope you never need to do this!

DIAGNOSTIC MODE:

If you press down the two middle buttons, menu and play, the ipod will reset. When the apple logo appears hold down the other three buttons (forward, back and the botton in the middle of the wheel). When the screen goes blank, release and you will be in diagnostic mode, with this menu:

A. 5 IN 1

B. RESET

C. KEY

etc

They select with right and left, not the scrollwheel. Some handy ones are:
D tests the audio, handy if the HD is not working but you want to check the audio section,

H tests the power circuits,
I tests the scrollwheel,
J tests the screen,
L tests the RAM, and
O tests the Hard Drive.