Chosen Solution

I maintain 120 Macs & have had very few kernel panics over the years. Over the past few months, I now have a dozen iBooks that won’t work or will work only in single-user mode. Five of these are 1.33 Ghz. I’ve read much on iFixit about iBook KPs, including the Airport-on-logic board problem. Thus far I’ve tried only software fixes (applejack / disk repair / memtest), with little/no success. My questions:

  1. The 1.33 Ghz machines KP right after login unless in safe boot. In safe boot Airport is disabled but only until next boot. Can I ‘permanently’ turn Airport off somehow in safe boot (or otherwise)?
  2. the other machines (1.0 & 1.2 Ghz) - despite my reading, I’m clueless how to proceed. Suggestions? Thanks in advance - this is a great site/service!

For a test, install a system from the original installation disk. These are eight year old machines and may be coming to the end of their lives. If the reinstall fails, replace the airport card on one. Also after this amount of time it may be necessary to start fully tearing them down, clean the vent ports and heat sink and reapply thermal paste.

It’s a bit early to say, but I think I’ve been bitten by the “Dual-band Airport causes kernel panic” issue described in this Apple Discussion post many months ago. It’s actually a Tiger bug. I guess it says something about my search skills that I spent MANY hours looking for a fix, and only after reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I was going to have to jettison nearly two dozen iBooks did I stumble upon the above link by accident. It’s only been hours, not days or weeks, since I applied this fix, but a couple of machines - that KP’d almost on startup - are still running. If my enthusiasm for this fix is dampened by reality, I’ll post here again.