help. firewire ibook won't power on

I gave a friend of mine an iBook (firewire) 366MHz G3 w/ 320 MB RAM, Airport, and OS 10.3.7 for christmas. Anyways, with my luck of course, with a couple of weeks it started to act up.

I guess what happened was, that the screen went crazy and flashed some colors/lines, then it just died and wouldn't power on. at which point my friend left it alone with the battery out, watched a movie, came back and it still wouldn't turn on. Apparently it did power on later to operate for a while and to die in the same manner.

I now have this ibook and i have to ask, what is wrong with it? I have an almost identical ibook and have tried to turn it on using my adaptor to no avail. tried resetting the PMU, which seemed to do nothing. I can push the power button and nothing happens. period. Though when i plug in the power adaptor, the ring around the plug will light up, otherwise it acts like it's not even plugged in.

I haven't opened up the case yet, hoping there might be something i can do. is there a way i can check for voltage in the battery compartment? i mean plug in the charger and check the contacts. i didn't think that the logic board problems were an issue with the clamshells, and it sounds like a power supply problem to me, but why would the screen freak out like that?

Any help would be great,

David

ok, its getting stranger now. i just noticed that the caps lock light will light up and turn off if you hit the caps lock key.

Is it maybe just the display that isn't working? Can you hook up an external monitor to check?

ok, now i am completely confused. For no particular reason i hit the PMU reset button again and hit the power button and it turned on, booted up and acted like nothing was wrong. so i left it on for a couple hours to see if it would act up, but it didn't. rebooted it, turned it off and on a few times, let the battery run down, recharged it, let it sleep, and it hasn't acted strangely on me yet.

The only thing that i had done differently was that i just quick pushed the PMU button and only waited five seconds, the other times i had waited quite a while longer, does anybody know if the timing between reset and power on is critical? I mean, i'm soooo happy it started to work without taking anything apart, but i'd like to figure out what caused it so it doesn't die five minutes after i give it back. Any ideas ?

And about the screen possibly being defective, i would rule that out as you can hear the hard drive start to spin when you turn it on, also the CD-ROM tray wouldn't pop out. so the main unit was down.