Powerbook G4 Titanium Problems

TylerH

My Powerbook G4 I recently bought used off a Bestbuy owned website has many problems. Every time I go on the 5 different pages on websites or 5 different websites (no matter how long im on each page) it quits Internet Explorer. Also the battery holds little charge, it usually says 4% battery life when plugged in then it will go up to 100% and back to 4% when unplugged. If anyone knows what I can do to fix it please write a comment.

TylerH

Also it has OS X 10.1.5

John

Hi Tyler! Thanks for the post. First off, you're using a massively outdated operating system that was obsolete almost a decade ago, and which is likely to inherently have issues. I would upgrade at least to Tiger 10.4. Also, Internet Explorer for the Mac is no longer supported, either by Microsoft or the community in general, which means no one is doing testing for it, which means you're going to constantly run into random issues. Go to firefox.com and download it, and that will provide you a much better experience, although, again, with 10.1.5, you'll likely have problems finding a version of Firefox that works with an OS that old.

As for the battery, download and run Coconut Battery from this link:

http://coconutbattery.en.softonic.com/mac

It will give you a much more detailed view of what's going on, including what the current capacity of the battery is compared to the original capacity. However, what you describe is a classic sign of a bad battery, i.e. a battery that thinks it's good but discovers shortly that it's not.

Hopefully Best Buy or whoever you bought this from is willing to stand behind the machine and take it back. No decent seller would represent a machine as "good" when it has 10.1.5 on it, and it sounds like they probably owe you a new battery as well.

Thanks and good luck!

John

TylerH

Thanks for the post John. I downloaded coconut battery from a different site yesterday and I clicked on the application and the application picture pops up partially in the dock then goes away and it won't open up. Also I've tried to get firefox but Internet Explorer messes up website tabs and buttons do to compatibility, so there's isn't any download button. I've been to Bestbuy and Fry's Electronics a few days ago but none of them carry 10.4 Tiger. Do you know anyplace that might have it?

John

Your best bet is eBay, but be careful, there are many versions, so you want to make sure to get one specifically for a Titanium G4. But don't spend more than $20, because frankly your machine isn't worth much of an investment. For $150 on eBay you can get a better machine, so paying $79 or whatever for Tiger just doesn't make sense.

Most likely Coconut Battery is in your Downloads folder, so go to your hard drive, then Users, then your profile, then Downloads, and hopefully it's there (if 10.1 even has the same folder structure as a modern OS...I don't remember).

TylerH

Ok I've been looking on eBay at possibly getting a new laptop. I looked in the hard drive user and there isn't any download folder

John

I don't know where it would be then...my memory of 10.1 is spotty at best. If there is a search function in the OS, you could search for it.