The piper is down - laptop problems

My trusty 12″ iBook which began acting quirky the second I got to Kelowna has been having some very serious issues now.

Whereas before it seemed to be not waking up properly from sleep and turning off randomly some of the time, would usually boot fully and then randomly turn off sometime hours sometimes minutes after I started working; it now appears to have a serious issue.

I’ve reset the NVRAM with 4 chimes and the PMU (with the Shift-Option-Apple-Power) but the machine still has a serious problem.

Sometimes is starts up with a quick fan whir, a chime and then goes to a dark sleep screen during startup (though it is still on and I need to turn it off by holding the power button down for 5 seconds or so) or it turns on and the fan whirrs noisily without the machine actually starting up. In nearly 10 tries the machine only made it to the logged in state after I typed in my password once and then shut down spontaneously (though again, needed to be forced off with the power buttong held down for 5+ seconds).

I think it must be a logic board/PMU problem, but thought I would throw this out to anyone who might have some more insight. I’m kind of hooped and it comes and a terrible time as we are still more than a week away from a new Apple Intel laptop announcement (PowerBooks or iBooks ). Arggghhhh…

At least the data seems ok. Any help appreciated if anyone has an idea. It’s going to take a while to get back up though the data on the drive seems fine and I’ve got a full backup from last week at home in case things go south quickly with this machine’s recovery.

Anyhow, if I owe you email or anything else, bear with me while I get it fixed or replaced.