Mac techy's help needed

My Mrs. has a powerbook G4 and is having problems with the keyboard, I only know how to work with PC's so am feeling a bit useless.

Basically every so often it 'spazzes out' for want of a better word. When it gets into this state you can't type and clicking the trackpad button only brings up the right-click menu and she has to restart it to be able to use the laptop again.

Anyone have any ideas?

She's running OSX 10.4, i think.

Bring it up to 10.4.11

Try resetting PMU and PRAM

All the info, plus probably people with exactly the same issue, should be on the discussion boards at apple.com

cheers, tried looking at the forums but initially I was going on her description of the problem.

What will those things do?

BMMF's suggestion is the right thing to do, sounds like a software issue if it's OK after a restart... Zapping the PRAM can sort loads of annoying niggles out...

thanks fellas, will try that then, any brownie points I receive will be passed on, although probably not by the same means I get them....

ressetting the pram hasn't helped. what data will be lost if I reset the PMU?

it shouldn't affect any data on the hard drive

ressetting the pram hasn't helped. what data will be lost if I reset the PMU?

nothing important.

i know there was a problem with keyboards on some apple laptops which they released a fix for a few months ago.
can't remember if the problem was with macbooks or powerbooks though..
is the problem worst when the laptop wakes up from sleep?

I've got the Deep Sleep widget (equivalent to hibernate mode on PCs), and sometimes the keyboard is inactive after waking - eventually I realised that on these occasions it's best to be patient, cos it does eventually kick in.

Once in a blue moon, whilst I'm keying in the password (I've got it set up to require one after waking) I get the equivalent of a key sticking. Usually end up forcing a shutdown in those rare instances.

back again, will reinstalling OSX wipe any of the drives? or is it like re-installing windows without formatting?