PowerBook 180 fixes

[atariangamer]

I'm wanting to get my PB180 back up to snuff. I've left it in a cabinet for awhile, and the battery had swollen up and is now leaking acid out of a crack in the casing, but thankfully I had removed it from the 'Book a few months ago. I'm in the process of getting another battery, but I had a question about the battery that's on the interconnect board. Is that worth replacing? Or should I just let it be? It's a plastic wrapped button cell with solder tabs on it, wouldn't be too hard to replace (If I could source a replacement, that is).

I'm also still looking for a replacement elevation foot. I think they're the same, the left and the right, but I'm missing the right one.

I'm also considering getting the external monitor adapter and setting up a designated desk space for this machine, but wanted to know if anyone had experience with the 180 as a desktop? I've got the 120MB hard disk and the ram upgraded to 14MB. If I got a SCSI CD-ROM drive, would this be a viable desktop for some classic Mac stuff?

Lastly, back to the portable side of things, I've read quite a lot about the 180 screen issue with the tunneling effect. My screen currently has this issue after an hour. I was using it to write papers when I first got it, but the screen started to be an issue. I've read two interesting things that I haven't seen tested, though. One was freezing/refrigerating the panel for awhile, and the other was to sit the panel in rice for a day. Both of these probably referred to a possible issue of moisture trapped in the liquid crystal, and as far as I know, nobody has tested these other than their initial posters. Would you suggest doing one or the other? The rice couldn't hurt, honestly (the freezing, though...).

Thanks in advance.

 

[LCARS]

Just in case you might check the forum again, I thought I would answer some of your questions.

I have actually read about people having success baking their LCD panel, although not long lasting success. I don't remember the temp but I think it was 160F or so. If the moisture could be evacuated and the layers properly sealed, it would probably be just fine in the long run.

Mine gets terribly obscure after 45 minutes. It is now at the point where I can't use it for writing so I bought the PowerBook video cable and a era-appropriate Apple CRT. I am still setting up the system but the 180 is no slouch for classic Mac software...at least not for software designed for it. Without PCMCIA, its expansion is limited but you can daisy chain a bunch of useful SCSI peripherals and even Ethernet (which will make things easier).

You can use an external SCSI hard drive and map virtual memory to it, which will speed things up. Or more simply, run RAM Doubler and Speed Doubler from Connectix. A PowerPC PowerBook might be snappier but there is a classic elegance on the 1XX series.

The soldered battery is the PRAM/clock battery. Some machines are very fussy about the state of those. Mine will not boot unless the (flat) main battery is removed. Pushing it in shuts the system off. If yours sits on a desk plugged in a boots reliably there shouldn't be a reason to replace it.

The feet come up on eBay from time to time. I do think they are interchangeable but I don't know for sure.