Per aspera

So remember that laptop I’m puttering with? It wouldn’t, under OS X.2, sign onto any wireless networks that required authentication. I solved that problem by yanking the password protection off my home network, leaving it free and open to everyone, because the set of “everyone” in this case includes me.

That I might experience the magical world of password-protected wireless networks, I upgraded to 10.3. Still haven’t tried it out with the wifi, but there are exciting new developments. To wit: if I let the Powerbook go to sleep, chances are that when I try to wake it up, it will decide it’s a brick. The little blinking light shuts off, all sound from within ceases, and pressing the power button yields no result. A little googling, and I found out that I can make it willing to boot up again by resetting the PMU. Sadly, this may mean that my L2 cache is b0n3z0red (for instance). I don’t even know what that means, except that apparently the Lombard is prone to such things, and a permanent fix would require a new logic board. That would be expensive.

Here’s a very informative thread. And it’s on a vendor’s board! Talk about freaking customer service. The aftermarket Mac community really seems to be good like that.