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Our admin suggested that I should remove the logic board from my Powerbook, so I could see better whether there are any loose bits or cracks in it causing the problems I’ve been seeing. So I went along with one of those disassembly guides and did some — erm — disassembling. It’s not a pleasing thing to do. I’m not much of a hardware fiddler anyway but there were so many little parts which I shouldn’t lose in the process and that bunch of scarily thin cables going to the screen which everybody says is easily damaged. I didn’t feel comfortable while doing this… but I assume it’ll be fine after the third time or so.
I couldn’t see any problem on the board in the end. Which apparently isn’t too surprising as if there is a problem with it it’ll likely be so small and hidden that you just can’t see it. With the gazillions of little things on the board (why couldn’t they just stick all of them into another chip?) it’s really hard to ‘see’ anything meaningful anyway. So I went to reassemble the machine, trying not to forget too many parts in doing so. And there may have been a slight improvement. The Powerbook actually boots when it’s turned on. It did get a kernel panic the first time I did so, but it’s been running fine since. While it even survived a trip on the bike since, I’m still not too optimistic that this situation will last.