Purchased a MacBook Pro 3,1 (2008) model via a newsgroup recently that was described as a project machine. It had a habit of shutting down or rebooting unexpectedly. Since it had no battery or power adapter, I acquired aftermarket versions of those as well. When the unit arrived, I found that it still contained a 500 GB drive and had the original 2 GB RAM. I also found that, sure enough, the machine would reboot after a few minutes to a couple of hours. In the process of troubleshooting, I found that both SO-DIMMs were exhibiting faults but a fresh 1 GB installed by itself ran for a couple of days without incident. I went ahead and purchased 2x2GB SO-DIMMs.

While waiting for the new RAM to arrive, I had purchased a second 85 Watt power supply (aftermarket) through eBay. Less than 90 minutes after starting to use that power supply, it popped and took out the MacBook as well. The PS was useless and was severely charred inside; the power/USB/audio board in the MacBook smelled of burnt components, too. I ordered a replacement and installed it when it arrived, only to find that the primary flat connector didn’t seat very well on the logic board, requiring jamming a piece of cardboard on top of it to maintain sufficient pressure at all times.

Lessons learned:

• Crappy aftermarket PS can kill your MacBook; glad I only had $100 invested in the Mac
• Green light on cable indicates a complete circuit only to a point; you might still have any number of other problems if the machine won’t boot
• Three flashes on the white LED on the front of the MacBook generally indicates that there is a RAM fault
• If green light on cable won’t come on, check that the flat connector from the power board to the logic board is properly seated
• For some reason, the MacBook won’t run with the keyboard “detached”, although it seems that it should be able to

So far, so good…