It’s possible that a capacitor might be faulty on the 17-inch PowerBooks. This problem sounds familiar (no pun intended) to the hissing problem that I’ve had with my old airport. There is a fix for the airport capacitor problem here.
It’s easy to tell if a capacitor is blown on a board. The physical appearance of the capacitor should indicate the part in question. Of course, soldering a capacitor on a computer motherboard is not for the faint of heart.
Anyway, it’s just a potential theory. Of course, it’s better to have Apple just fix the problem. I hope this helps your readers with some adventuresome 17-inch PowerBooks who are handy with a soldering iron and know how to take
the machine apart. (Darren Shu).
Read More…
It’s possible that a capacitor might be faulty on the 17-inch PowerBooks. This problem sounds familiar (no pun intended) to the hissing problem that I’ve had with my old airport. There is a fix for the airport capacitor problem here.
It’s easy to tell if a capacitor is blown on a board. The physical appearance of the capacitor should indicate the part in question. Of course, soldering a capacitor on a computer motherboard is not for the faint of heart.
Anyway, it’s just a potential theory. Of course, it’s better to have Apple just fix the problem. I hope this helps your readers with some adventuresome 17-inch PowerBooks who are handy with a soldering iron and know how to take
the machine apart. (Darren Shu)
A comment about the PB17″ hissing. I’m no EE expert, but a hiss could be a bad capacitor. I had a bad capacitor in an original Airport that hissed constantly because it was low quality and got too hot to the point where it was failing. The hissing also corresponded to network traffic… so it wasn’t on all the time (sound similar?). The noise went away once I followed some directions on how to replace a couple capacitors. (Chas Conway)
After listening to your aiff file of the 17″ PBook hiss, I realized that my 15″ PB 867 also makes a similar, but slightly different sound. If you add the sound of a couple of flying mosquitos to the crackling sound I heard of the 17″ hiss, you have the sound my PB 867 makes infrequently and only for very short periods of time under intense processor and graphics card useage. I can usually only induce this sound when *RAPIDLY* browsing the Web on a super-high speed Internet connection (at my workplace). On my PBook the sound seems to come from the center read of the computer, near the place where an external monitor would be connected. (Scott Newman)
