David Adesnik has been taking some flak about his mistaken belief that Windows is somehow a better operating system than Mac OS X. Having been a confirmed Linux nerd for several years, I now divide my time equally between OS X and Linux. I bought a PowerBook late last year. Since getting it, I’ve found myself using it much more than Fiachra, my monster Linux workstation that looks like it fell out of a stealth bomber. With OS X I get the best of both worlds, because I can still use all my favorite software and waste time with iTunes and the like.

About a month ago, however, my PowerBook suddenly started to freeze up apparently at random. By “freeze up” I mean everything would just stop suddenly. No mouse, no Finder, no sleepmode, nothing. To get it to recover, I had to—wince—unplug it and take out the battery for a few seconds, and then restart. This began happening two or three times a day. Clearly something was severely wrong.

I first noticed it after updating to version 10.2.6 of Mac OS X, and so initially I thought it might be a software problem, or at least a bad interaction between my RAM and the new OS. The only thing that seemed to trigger the crash—and even then, not reliably—was moving the computer, or more specifically moving it from the front left side. Sometimes, while typing, my left hand would move in a way that seemed to cause a freeze. It was all very ugly.

After posting on Apple’s discussion forums (to no avail), I eventually found this thread which, I think, solved the problem. I removed the keyboard and found that near where the left-side ‘Apple’ key would be was a little orange ribbon. I think it connects to the RAM chips which live under the middle of the keyboard. Half of the ribbon had become wedged underneath the metal cage that forms the inner frame of the laptop. I think that occasional contact with the metal was causing a short in the cable. Very gently, I pulled the cable out and put a little cut-out piece of insulating tape around the edge of the metal cage. No more contact with bare metal. Since then (three days ago) I haven’t had a single freeze-up. So it looks like this was indeed the problem. If you own a 15" TiBook, you might want to take a quick look under the keyboard.