> My 1400c had speaker distortion, but a
> 68KMLA member said it wasn't the
> speaker, but a motherboard fault.
I know now, as I bought some PB 1400 speakers....
Aaaah. I only had the single speaker from the other cannibalised PB1400. That was a fun project though. I bought it fairly cheaply from a French guy on eBay (I'm a UK member) as spares / repairs. It didn't work, but that was fine as I figured there might be enough bits and pieces to improve my PB1400cs/117/16MB (as it was at the time). I found it had a working active matrix LCD and another 16MB of RAM, taking me to 32MB of RAM. Then I found out it was only the 133MHz CPU that didn't work (and still doesn't, but is close to working as
@croissantking found out). This second PB1400c (now bits of a PB1400cs) was missing screws, but I gradually built it up over a year and then sold it on.
I had too many PowerBooks before (more than 30), so I was not able to leave them all in open position. I sold half of them 5 years ago on ebay, as I had too many.
I think it can be a bit addictive, because many Macs have quite a bit of individual character and then one starts to think of the need for backups in case the one you use the most fails. These days I consider the 68KMLA and other online groups (and eBay) to be the backup: that is, we have lots of spare bits and more importantly, knowledge.
I myself have had a few PowerBooks in my time. I started with a PowerBook 100, which I saw in an advert in WHSmith (a supersized-newsagent chain in the UK), in Manchester, in 1996, which was the epicentre of the IRA bomb a couple of weeks later! I loved it, but then it got stolen when I accidentally left it behind at Manchester Uni around mid-1997. Then Steve Furber (who invented the ARM CPU) sold me his old Duo 230, but I've also had a PB5300; access to a PB150 (briefly); a PB190 (but I don't remember how I got that); two iBooks (original Tangerine/300MHz and ice 600MHz) as well as a PB G4 12"/1.5GHz.
But I've never really had more than a few at a time. I still have the PB G4 12", but I can't screw the heatsink down (a turret is stripped); the iBook/600 whose GPU is dodgy and a PB5300c/117 whose power board needs the battery corrosion cleaned off.
Also, the more computers, the less time I can spend on any one of them. The PB1400c is now 166MHz with 56MB of RAM, a Floppy drive and CD-ROM. So, it's pretty good now!