"
Hi Mike!
Recently purchased a cube for my partner and have had the frustrating
experience of the random shutdowns, sleeps and restarts.. After reading the
checklists from Apple - checking for loose cables and ensuring a level
surface... I had read the report from
your site regarding the issue of ensuring the torque screws were tightened,
and they were. I was hoping they weren't!
The setup is a 450Mhz uP, 196Mb ram (2-2-2) the stock WD 20Gb drive and a PC
vga monitor (cant afford the flat panel). I thought about the issue being a
fault with the cubes onboard power regulator thinking that the DVI displays
using power off the machine could possibly cause power drains or surges
under weird conditions, but this setup is not doing that, the monitor I'm
using is self powered from its own mains plug, non the less I did follow the
Apple recommendation and reseat the power regulator. I wasn't surprised tho
to find that it was comfortably in place to start with. After reseating it,
the problem still persists. My partner points out that the random sleeps and
shutdowns happen without fail after constant use of the rom drive (ie
installing heaps of apps or retrieving large files off cds..) Now that much
I could imagine definitely being a power supply fault *IF* we had a cube
powered monitor (especially the 17" crt)..
Another interesting point I found was that at home the random restarts were
relatively random after CDrom usage after 15Minutes or so. Add to that,
after shutting the machine down and having it unplugged for 5 mins and
restarting it, it would crash on average every 15 minutes there after. We
brought the cube into my work office which happens to be air conditioned.
After powering the machine up it would shut down within minutes AND without
using the rom drive at all. The difference between my office and at home was
that my office was air conditioned / dehumidified to 18 degrees C.
From that clue I figured it may be the actual touch switch that's faulty..
Being a capacitance switch it can detect stray em fields which could pass
for a "human touch," and such fields are more prominent under dry
conditions.
I opened up the cube core and began tweaking with the power switch section.
I lifted the metal frame that holds the touch switch and lifted the frame up
as much as it could bend - in the attempt to raise it closer to its seat in
the outer shell. It raised about 5mm after lifting it, but settled to about
2-3mm above its normal height after I released it.
I replaced the core back into its casing and restarted it. So far, for the
past week and a bit, it has behaved as it should, no random shut downs or
sleeps. I have also had it in my office this afternoon for 5 hours under the
same conditions as I mentioned earlier, and it has functioned correctly
during that time.
At this stage I thought it would be prudent to let you know about this
experience!
On a side note, my partner had pointed out a crash from waking up the cube
from sleep. The finder would always quit with the mouse pointer
disappearing, so nothing could be clicked. Even moving to a "virtual" almost
top left corner to activate the apple menu failed - the mouse was just
gone.. Playing with the energy saver control panel to disable shut down
screen/hdd after x minutes had corrected that problem. ALSO, with the energy
saver options enabled, I had toyed with the extensions to take a stab at
seeing if there was a conflict, and I had noted that with two ATI extensions
turned on (either two) the machine would crash from waking up. Disabling
either of them (or both of them) would wake the machine up flawlessly.
However, with either extension disabled, there was no video acceleration, so
it was a catch 22 to have them turned off..
Anyway, I hope that helps some issues with other Cube owners. We both would
like to say that it is a beautiful machine and (now) a pleasure to work
with, and that you have managed a useful AND comprehensive website for a
long long time. Thank you!
Kind regards,
A.Prasad and B.Dickins"
