I recently attended an auction and bought a box of stuff, which included an Apple G4 Titanium Powerbook. There was no power adapeter, so I purchased one, and the thing won't power up. I'm suspecting either the power supply or battery may be dead. Any thoughts?

Dead battery doesn't matter if the power adapter is in. You can take the battery out completely and it runs fine.

First thing to check: plug the adapter into another PB, which you know to be working properly, and see if it shows power coming in. (If it's running OS X, look at the icon near the right end of the menu bar. The D-cell-shaped icon will show an X for battery bay empty, solid bar indicating percent of charge for running on the battery, and either a sine wave or a wall plug for external power coming in.)

If the power adapter checks out it could be many things, starting with the connections where it plugs in. At that point I'd go to a service person. (You might try pressing Reset (tiny round button just inboard of the modem port under the port cover at the rear, use a paper clip to push it), but it probably won't do anything.)

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50959 may be a start. In your case particularly try numbers 6 and 8. 7 may apply, but I'm assuming you don't even hear a chime at all in which case you won't be able to do that anyway. 3 could be a possibility unless you're certain of the type of power adapter it needed.

Beyond that it's probably something physically broken or burned out that has to do with the power connection (right near where the adapter plugs into the PowerBook).

www.pbfixit.com has an extensive series of photo-guides showing how to take apart and repair just about anything on any Powerbook made by Apple in the past 7 or 8 years. They also sell spare parts. Depending on what's wrong w/ it, you could have yourself a (relatively) new Powerbook for as little as $30-50 and some elbow grease. I'd go to your nearest Apple Store or dealer, get them to do a diagnosis and then buy the parts from pbfixit.com.

JD

Thanks for the info folks! Well, I left it plugged in for a while, and it works. I guess the battery was out of juice and needed a kick start. Of course, now it's asking for a password. Is there any way to reset it, or do I need to buy OS X.? and reformat the drive?

If it's already running OS X then you need to obtain an OS X CD (somehow) and boot from this. There is a password reset utility provided which allows you to reset the administrative password and thus gain access.

If it's not running OS X (possible, but unlikely) then you can either boot with SHIFT held down which will bypass most extensions or just reformat and install OS X.