In March, I recieved a US powerbook, imported to the UK, trouble is that the PB didn’t have the right plug, so for the time being, I used a Generic UK 2-pin adapter, then I started getting shocks. Looking at the adapter, it has 3 pins, (yes, 3!), at first, I thought it was a straight 2 pin adapter, live and neutral, with the metal knob stablising the 2 pin adapter that goes on the head of the Power supply.

I talked to my father and he thought it was an earthing pin, but I ran a test at the date I write this, tested the earthing on the PC with a Multimeter set to DC, the read out was under 150mAs, this was hooked up to either the radiator (in which case, I used the unpainted part, inside the bleeding valve, the rest of the raidator is painted very light blue), then I tried the laptop, the Multimeter crept upto 300mA, then settled down to under 150mA.

Before anyone says that the house earthing is crap (I have been given 70V shocks from a desktop PC, because it wasn’t earthed properly with a plug that had a stable earth connection, solved by replacing the power coard!), I found a tester in my fathers room, it tests the earth state of my plugs, the tester thinks that all 4 sockets are correctly earthed. Seems like it isn’t earth properly as we’d expect.

Quite a long list unfortunately as my powerbook (which has for the most part been great) gets a hell of a lot of use..

They told me the shocks were the result of build ups of static electricity in the machine and this was quite common and nothing to worry about.

I am slightly suspicious as I have only noticed this over the last few months.

Along with this I had my screen hinge snap- they so far will not fix this even though it was not the result of a drop or any other accidents I am aware of.

They are replacing the DVD drive which had become very unreliable and my power supply which seemed to occasionally deliver a fluctuating current which in turn periodically crapped out the invertor for the LCD backlight causing my screen to go dark.

I would love to hear from anyone who has succesfully had their screen hinge replaced under warantee. As far as I am concerned it is a design flaw and they should take care of it.

Hope this resoles the issue.

I just read the comments, and am going to get
a grounded plug converter. (The one I am using
is not.)

I’m just glad that Apple was nice enough to fix the hinge seeing as it would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of $2000 to get it fixed (the entire screen needed to be replaced due to the hinge breaking and actually ripping a hole in the bottom of the monitor)… and all I had done was shut the laptop.

Actually, I wouldn’t mind selling my desktop and replacing it with a cheaper computer to serve as just a “download server”.

Best of luck in the future.

I hope it’s not power escaping the laptop, but I wouldn’t doubt it. This sucker has had so many things go wrong with it:I had dead pixels, a “titanium” hinge cracked in half for no reason, the hard drive went bad, the power adapter crapped out and the keyboard got worn out. Everything but the dead pixels happened out of warranty. I called apple about the broken hinge to no avail… but through certain means I was able to get them to comply and fix it for free.

For as much crap as this thing has given me, I will never purchase another laptop… but I still can’t complain too much, at least it’s a Mac.

I had this problem when getting wet washing out of my washing machine – I’d feel this funny tingling when I touched the drum. That turned out to be a house-wide earthing problem, solved by an electrician strapping everything he could find to chunky ground wires.

Anyway, if you want to swap your laptop for my washing machine, that’d be just grand.

I put my foot on the air vent and started moving my hand against the laptop (this sounds like a dirty book) and there was the familiar current.

Then I unplugged the laptop and lo and behold: no current. So what’s that mean?

Nothing else in the apartment has a problem, just the laptop. And it happens when I’m on the road, too, so it’s the laptop, not the house. I’m going to get some silicon pads or something to put over the metal rings and stuff, one of these days.

As for your house, well, Ronin was typing in all caps like a hysterical AOL newbie, but he’s right… even if you don’t fry yourself, you could be frying your precious electrical equipment…

My Ti/500 does the same thing to my wrist. I tend to find it happens more when I’m sitting on chairs with rubber feet (I assume that’s because I’m insulated from the ground).

Ronin: calm down.

I now have a new powerbook… 5 days old and so far nothing.

I WON”T TELL YOU WHERE IT IS CAUSE YOU”LL TRY TO FIX IT AND KILL YOURSELF.

CALL AN ESTABLISHED ELECTRICIAN NOW !!!!