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I should preface this by saying that I'm a beginner when it comes to trying to diagnose and fix compact Macs, but I'm learning. I did manage to fix an intermittent screen problem on my Mac SE by reflowing some joints on the analog board, for example. I have three Mac Plus units. One of them...

I recently bought a recapped Macintosh SE/30, and I don't understand the way it's been behaving. Sometimes it will boot to the hard disk and sometimes it will just show the floppy icon (sometimes with the flashing question mark and sometimes without). Sometimes I can get it to boot from an...

I bought a 2400c last year (which I mentioned in this thread a while back). I didn't use it much for the last few months, and when I went to try using it again I found that the backlight won't come on. You can still barely see that the screen is active so it appears to be functional, but...

I started collecting PPC Macs in earnest just a few months ago, and one of the main reasons I decided to essentially go all out and get all of the ones I had wanted back in the day was that they were extremely cheap. But I’ve been following the prices since then and it seems like they have...

Since I've been restoring a lot of older Macs recently, I decided to have a compact Mac-themed birthday party. I brought along a couple of them for people to play around on, and we used the SE on the right to play a three-player game of Jeopardy, which was pretty fun. My sister made up some...

I'm a Japanese translator and a Mac fan, so I thought it would be interesting to try and recreate the earliest iteration of Japanese-compatible Mac. However, I don't have a large amount of knowledge about the release of the Mac in Japan. I think the original Macintosh was only available in Japan...

I'm relatively sure that you can't just using the Personal Hotspot feature because the airport cards aren't compatible with the encryption used, but I was wondering about USB tethering. I've never really done anything with that, but it would be nice to be able to actually access the web while...

I’ve been working on restoring a number of clamshell iBooks recently. In some cases they required some minor repairs such as resoldering the power port, but for the most part they all worked fine with the exception of the very noisy hard disks, which I am replacing with SSDs. Most of them were...

I recently got a PowerBook 2400c (from eBay but I think the seller may be a member here), and I've had a few issues with it. It has apparently had a Cardbus mod performed on it to allow the use of various PC cards, but I haven't had a huge amount of luck with them. I have a 802.11b-based network...

I got this "untested" eMate on eBay for $35 shipped, which seemed like a heck of deal. Even included a nice stylus. I figured even if it didn't work, it would be a cool object to have. I had a couple of Newtons many years ago, so I am still kind of familiar with the OS, but have never had or...

I bought a 1400c for a pretty good price, but when it arrived I found that it gave me a message saying, "The built-in memory test has detected a problem. Please contact a service technician for assistance." It would boot up okay after that, but would only recognize 56MB instead of the 64MB that...

I've been going a little crazy buying old computers lately, so I thought I would write about a few of them here. I've already talked about my Macintosh Plus with an accelerator board installed that I got for about $80 + shipping, and that one has worked out pretty well now that I've figured out...

My first PowerBook was a Lombard PowerBook G3, which I replaced not long afterward with a Pismo. That one I used for quite a while, even upgrading it to a G4 back when such things were possible. I never owned a Titanium PowerBook because I liked my Pismo so much, and I didn't really have the...

While browsing eBay on two separate days I found a Mac Plus and a Mac SE that both seemed to have accelerator cards installed. The sellers didn't mention it in either case and seemed to know nothing about it, so it while I didn't pay too much for them, it was a bit of a gamble. Still, I'm kind...

(I posted this to the Vintage Mac subreddit, but I think it's appropriate here. And I can post more photos.) I got this PowerMac G5 locally for $50. It didn’t have a hard disk, but the guy seemed to think that it was otherwise okay. After getting it home, the musty smell inside made it pretty...

I just got in another Mac SE and it’s got a bit of a weird problem. The screen will periodically flicker and get larger horizontally by about a cm. Supposedly it was working perfectly before I got it, but it wasn’t packaged very well by the seller and I’m thinking that something may have gotten...

As projects go this one wasn't very hard at all -- I finished everything in a couple of hours. But I've had this Pismo PowerBook since it was new, and I used it a lot even after I had moved on to a 12" PowerBook G4 as my main machine, so it was very good to see it come back to life. I think this...

I should probably preface this by saying that I am very much a beginner when it comes to compact Macs. I had basically never even used one before a couple of weeks ago (having started as a Mac user with a PowerMac 9600 tower), and I certainly had never disassembled or serviced one. But I've...

For some reason I got the vintage computer collecting bug recently and have bought a few different systems in the last several weeks. This is probably the one that I was most excited about, though. I have always loved the design of the early PowerBooks, but didn't actually buy a Mac until 1997...