3lectr1cPPC
Well-known member
Over the past couple of weeks I've been enjoying my recent pickup of a PowerBook 3400c a lot! I own 4 working batteries for it, and have been taking full advantage and using it on the go. It's fast, it looks super cool, and it's absolutely one of my favorite old laptops. So much so that I'm planning on giving it a full tuneup, addressing hopefully every one of its faults, and giving it an SSD upgrade while I'm at it. Here's a list of my plans, as well as one question I have on the whole process.
1. Hinge tightening. The display hinges have a bit of play in them right now, which concerns me with how this can add extra stress on the fragile plastic. I'm *really* hoping that this is just a loose screw problem, and not wear on the metal hinges themselves. The hinge itself doesn't feel at all floppy, so I'm pretty sure it's the latter. I guess I'll see.
2. Speaking of the fragile plastic, I'll be applying some superglue to all the hinge standoffs to hopefully strengthen then and avoid failure.
3. I will be swapping out the 20GB hard drive I installed with an IDE to SD card adapter to vastly improve speed, and hopefully also boost my battery life! I'm planning on using a 32GB card for the time being, as 64GB might be a bit much for it to handle. I've heard about the 8GB boot partition limit on old world Macs, but the 20GB drive I have in there is already over that with no issues. Why could this be? My other question is about what type of card to buy. Will any quality SD card work, or is it like CF cards, where only "industrial" type cards that don't identify as removable media work? Maybe @LaPorta can answer this.
4. Finally, with it apart for all of this, I might as well replace the 3 or so capacitors on the logic and DC power boards. There's no point in not doing it now seeing as waiting would only increase the chance of me breaking plastic having to take it apart yet again. Does anyone have capacitor reference for this model? It's a little new, and I doubt many people have given it a go yet, but I'd like to just as preventative maintenance, which is the whole point of all of this anyway really.
That's all I've got for now, I'll update as I go about doing these fixes and upgrades. I'll also be taking plenty of photos, as I plan to at the same time write a full disassembly and service guide, iFixit-style for my website, macdat.net!
3lectr1c
1. Hinge tightening. The display hinges have a bit of play in them right now, which concerns me with how this can add extra stress on the fragile plastic. I'm *really* hoping that this is just a loose screw problem, and not wear on the metal hinges themselves. The hinge itself doesn't feel at all floppy, so I'm pretty sure it's the latter. I guess I'll see.
2. Speaking of the fragile plastic, I'll be applying some superglue to all the hinge standoffs to hopefully strengthen then and avoid failure.
3. I will be swapping out the 20GB hard drive I installed with an IDE to SD card adapter to vastly improve speed, and hopefully also boost my battery life! I'm planning on using a 32GB card for the time being, as 64GB might be a bit much for it to handle. I've heard about the 8GB boot partition limit on old world Macs, but the 20GB drive I have in there is already over that with no issues. Why could this be? My other question is about what type of card to buy. Will any quality SD card work, or is it like CF cards, where only "industrial" type cards that don't identify as removable media work? Maybe @LaPorta can answer this.
4. Finally, with it apart for all of this, I might as well replace the 3 or so capacitors on the logic and DC power boards. There's no point in not doing it now seeing as waiting would only increase the chance of me breaking plastic having to take it apart yet again. Does anyone have capacitor reference for this model? It's a little new, and I doubt many people have given it a go yet, but I'd like to just as preventative maintenance, which is the whole point of all of this anyway really.
That's all I've got for now, I'll update as I go about doing these fixes and upgrades. I'll also be taking plenty of photos, as I plan to at the same time write a full disassembly and service guide, iFixit-style for my website, macdat.net!
3lectr1c