MacMan
Well-known member
This is the second PowerBook 165c I've owned. The first one was given to me many years ago and I used it for a long time until I started getting problems with the display. It turned out that the display cable had snagged in the hinge and ripped, which is practically irreparable. In addition to this, my first 165c had a toasted power manager meaning that I had to do a bit of botched surgery to get it to work at all.
So having had my 165c sitting in a box for years, my interest in it was rekindled when I saw a recent eBay listing for a non-working 165c. Perhaps I could use the parts to get my 165c going again... Some furthur enquiries to the seller revealed that the 165c in question wouldn't turn on, simple as that. It was sold without a hard drive too. I got it for a few quid and it arrived today, so the first thing I did was plug it in and try to switch on - no dice. Then I removed the battery, (knowing that they can sometimes cause startup problems in older PowerBooks), and tried again. This time it worked, a startup chime followed by the disk and question mark.
A half hour with a screwdriver saw the hard drive, ram expansion and a couple of plastic parts moved from my old 165c to the newcomer. It was my original intention to get my old PowerBook working with parts from this, but it's actually worked out easier doing it the other way round. Now I have a working 165c with 12MB RAM and a 160MB hard drive, in all it's chunky colour passive matrix glory!
So having had my 165c sitting in a box for years, my interest in it was rekindled when I saw a recent eBay listing for a non-working 165c. Perhaps I could use the parts to get my 165c going again... Some furthur enquiries to the seller revealed that the 165c in question wouldn't turn on, simple as that. It was sold without a hard drive too. I got it for a few quid and it arrived today, so the first thing I did was plug it in and try to switch on - no dice. Then I removed the battery, (knowing that they can sometimes cause startup problems in older PowerBooks), and tried again. This time it worked, a startup chime followed by the disk and question mark.
A half hour with a screwdriver saw the hard drive, ram expansion and a couple of plastic parts moved from my old 165c to the newcomer. It was my original intention to get my old PowerBook working with parts from this, but it's actually worked out easier doing it the other way round. Now I have a working 165c with 12MB RAM and a 160MB hard drive, in all it's chunky colour passive matrix glory!
