Chosen Solution
My 12" PowerBook is suffering from the notorious Narcolepsy problems, which have been well documented for this range. The consensus solution seems to be to remove a faulty temperature sensor which sleeps the machine by giving erratic ‘overtemp’ outputs. On the 15" and 17" models there are visual guides available online to locate the Trackpad sensor, which seems to be at fault on those models. However the sensor giving the funny readings on my 12" (and others people’s, it seems) is the Processor Topside Sensor. Both Temperature Monitor and ThermographX agree on this. I’m well out of warranty and fancy throwing caution to the wind and clipping this off. Could anyone tell me where in the machine it is? Thanks in advance.
Teymur, there are lots of users out there looking for that sensor right now. In the meantime check this site out. It somewhat explains how to disable the sensor from the firmware/software side. Instead of physical disabling or replacing it, just shut it down http://www.swisswuff.ch/joomla/index.php… Of course I suppose it might shut down sensor that are needed to function right. So do proceed with that in mind.Hope this helps until we find the location of the sensor…good luck
machead3: Sadly no solution yet. I did open the machine up using the iFixit guide and have a look around, but the internal layout is pretty different to the 15" and 17" models which, as I noted above, have illustrated guides available to track down the faulty sensor. In any case, the problem on those is the trackpad sensor, which I found doesn’t exist on the 12". Unfortunately the machine is not really functional. It’s only useable for five minutes before it starts repeatedly falling asleep. So its data has been moved elsewhere and all it’s doing at the moment is sitting on my shelf. I took it into a Genius Bar here in London; as I suspected they suggested replacing the whole logic board. This is obviously not economically sensible. Seems such a pity that this tiny component is making an otherwise-functional computer useless. I thought this topic would have been forgotten about long ago - thanks for digging it up! Have you any ideas?
OldTurkey Happy new year and thanks for your reply. I had found the first site when I first tried to solve this problem. The author indicates that his solution didn’t work permanently (only for “several weeks”). This is why I was trying to find a way to do the hardware mod of hacking out the temperature sensor - a method which seems to be universally successful when applied to 15" and 17" models. Despite all that - and I’m really no whizz with the Terminal - there’s really nothing to lose so I may give it a go anyway. The second link gives me a 404 error. If your mission digs anything further up, I’d be very grateful to hear it.
