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190 Plastics Issue

MattB

Well-known member
My 190 is in good shape and boots perfectly, but has a few problems. One is a main battery that cracked and leaked. The machine will likely never run on battery power again, but that's not a big issue. The big issue now is that it's fallen victim to "SpindlerPlastic" syndrome and the plastic on the lower right side of the screen is separating badly. From what I understand gluing it back together isn't a workable option, so at this point I'm trying to source replacement plastics for the machine. I've found plastics from a 190cs, but I'm not sure about the screen size. Did the cs model have a bigger screen than the standard 190? And would I be better off just sourcing a whole parts machine and transplanting its plastics and screen as one unit?

PB190.JPG

 

MattB

Well-known member
As a side topic, what keyboard do I have in my machine? The "enter" key doesn't look like the normal one on a US keyboard. This machine was a recycling find at my high school, so I don't know much of its history.

 

androda

Well-known member
You can also steal full screen assemblies from the 5300. My 190cs's dual scan color is getting replaced with 5300c's active matrix color (same resolution). You just need the full display cable, going all the way to the motherboard.

 

Franklinstein

Well-known member
The grayscale screen is also a little thinner than the color one and has a unique design on the back compared to the fatter color screens. If you want to use the computer in bright light or possibly outdoors, Grayscale is usually better than color because it has fewer filters to drown out the display. Also supposedly the grayscale has slightly better battery life (probably just in minutes and a moot point anymore but still a consideration for true road warriors back in the day). Otherwise the C and CS screens from a 5300 will swap straight over assuming the case doesn't splinter into ever more jagged plastic chunks in the process. A CE display probably will work too but since the 190 only has 512k of VRAM on the logic board you won't get thousands of colors @ 800x600 like you would with the 1MB on the 5300 board.

 
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