04-06-2007, 12:02 PM

For two weeks my G4 refused to acknowledge that Shift-Command-4 is a legit key combination. I had to use Grab for cropped screen shots. Shift-Command-Spacebar-4 didn't work, either.

I ran the fix apps — Onyx, MainMenu, Applejack, fsck -fy, the DVD's Disk Utility — (they're all the same, anyway) and lined up all the usual suspects and deleted them — plists and caches the fixer-uppers may have missed, and safe-started a couple of times and created a new user account. Nothing worked. Well, 4 worked. Shift-$ worked, but Shift-Command-4 wouldn't work.

A few minutes ago, Shift-Command-4 came back to life. Is this an example of cosmic-ray interference, of reverse entropy, of spontaneous mechanical healing? What gives?

04-06-2007, 12:08 PM

Its just your mac reminding you not to take it for granted

Just remind it how much you love it every so often and itll be much happier

~~ TS ~~

04-06-2007, 12:22 PM

Originally Posted by TenderSurrender

Just remind it how much you love it every so often and itll be much happier

~~ TS ~~

Well, it is more responsive than a pet rock.

04-06-2007, 12:46 PM

Did it start working right after the restart required by running all those maintenance scripts? Maybe it just needed some time to get its wits back after all cleaning up. LOL

04-06-2007, 12:56 PM

Originally Posted by MacHeadCase

Did it start working right after the restart required by running all those maintenance scripts?

Nope. It didn't work last night. Today I needed a screen shot of a partial page and tried it again before firing up Grab. Astonishment and great rejoicing followed.

04-06-2007, 12:59 PM

Oh fer sure, fer sure. Well I dunno maybe it just needed time to rest.

Which tasks did you run with all those utilities? Any cache cleaning involved?

04-06-2007, 01:08 PM

The so-called deep-cleaning with all the apps that offer it, along with the preference checks in Applejack.

The OS X system partition has nothing else on it, and there are 30 gigs of free space. The Documents folder, along with everything else, is on another X partition.

No software update is involved, either. Monolingual isn't the culprit, and neither is TrimTheFat because Shift-Command-4 stopped working long after I had used them — and now it's working again, anyway.

Edit: By system partition I mean the full install, but no documents of any kind.

04-06-2007, 01:33 PM

Well beats me why today it started working but not right after yesterday's restarts.

Maybe someone else with more knowledge can explain this mystery for us.

Oh! I remember with the G4 Macs some of them needed some time to drain the capacitors for like 30 minutes or so. Maybe that's why it happened that yesterday's restarts weren't enough but the shut down for the night was enough? I dunno... *Scratches head*

04-06-2007, 01:46 PM

It hadn't worked for a while, and I don't leave it on overnight. Maybe there's a port inside it for Geritol. It's getting a little long in the tooth.