This machine is a resurrected old portable powerhouse with a massive windshield and chrome accents. It was in a pretty poor state of disrepair when I found it, but it was complete, the removed screws all bagged with the machine and all mounting brackets still intact, all it was missing was a hard drive, but it needed more than that to bring it back to life.
PowerBook G4 17-inch
1.5GHz PowerPC G4 Processor
512MB RAM
40GB HDD (one of my spares)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 64MB
802.11G AirPort Extreme Wireless
1 Hour Battery
Mac OS X Panther 10.3.9
It needed some work, admittedly. Many of the internal board and speaker screws were loose. The hard drive was long gone so a replacement was sourced from my collection of spare parts. A few dents needed tapping back out, and while the sides and back of the machine came up like brand new (even from close by, it doesn't look like it's been repaired) the front of the machine does have some warped aluminium, but nothing overly noticeable and certainly nothing worth obsessing over. The sound board cable was reseated at both ends to restore the sound, which it had been lacking. A quick reseat of the display inverter and LVDS cables, followed by a quick bash around blindly in Open Firmware, restored the backlight to operation.
One very happy looking PowerBook G4. Was only this morning it was sitting in pieces in the office next to me awaiting garbage collection. A little work and a little care do go a long way to bringing an otherwise beautiful piece of engineering back to life.
Cheers,
Mic.
