PowerBook 540c Restoration Project

[alexGS]

Another option. For folks that have a front bezel that is intact except for the clips that have broken off, here are a set of clips you can glue onto the stubs to fix them.

Thank you - I think these are the clips I found on Thingiverse and they are excellent, I have printed them standing on their side so the strength/flexibility is optimised.

May I humbly suggest that similar solid clips would work better than the fingers of the cover STL? I have difficulty printing those fingers with sufficient strength

 

[jmacz]

Thank you - I think these are the clips I found on Thingiverse and they are excellent, I have printed them standing on their side so the strength/flexibility is optimised.

Oh, there was a clip design on Thingiverse? I didn't realize. Made the ones above yesterday off a quick design I did. Yes, I also printed them sideways as well.

May I humbly suggest that similar solid clips would work better than the fingers of the cover STL? I have difficulty printing those fingers with sufficient strength

Sure, no problem! I will make a revision 3 with a solid clip instead of with the fingers like the stock ones.

 

[jmacz]

v3 attached. This time with solid clips instead of the fingered ones like stock. @alexGS.

 

[alexGS]

Oh, there was a clip design on Thingiverse? I didn't realize. Made the ones above yesterday off a quick design I did. Yes, I also printed them sideways as well.

Fantastic quick work on the cover - thank you - I shall enjoy printing and testing as soon as I can

The clips I was talking about are in https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4368963 - second item - sorry for the confusion, I lose track of whose design is whose! They were posted by another member here.

 

[croissantking]

I have an idea for the 500 series that I think would be quite a cool upgrade. I've been inspired by @twelvetone12 and their Airtalk module that fits in the internal modem upgrade slot of the 100 series.

One could design a small AAUI adapter to fit the space where the modem DAA board goes, putting an RJ-45 socket where the RJ-11 usually goes. And then route some wires internally to the pins of the AAUI port.

 

[jmacz]

One could design a small AAUI adapter to fit the space where the modem DAA board goes, putting an RJ-45 socket where the RJ-11 usually goes. And then route some wires internally to the pins of the AAUI port.

Yeah, that would be nice.

 

[croissantking]

Yeah, that would be nice.

First step would be to crack one of those AAUI to RJ45 adapters open and see how much physical space the circuitry takes up, and if the components are available new.

 

[croissantking]

Here it is, will look into redesigning this to fit the 500 series modem/DAA space. Also will try to see which parts are available new - would rather not butcher this adapter but if it has to be done then so be it.

 

[cheesestraws]

would rather not butcher this adapter but if it has to be done then so be it.

Instead of butchering AAUI MAUs, you can get AUI 10BaseT MAUs for cheap, and they're about as common as dirt. AAUI and AUI are electrically identical (except that AAUI doesn't provide 12V) so you might as well butcher the non-rare hardware.

I can send you a couple for experimental purposes if you like.

 

[croissantking]

Instead of butchering AAUI MAUs, you can get AUI 10BaseT MAUs for cheap, and they're about as common as dirt. AAUI and AUI are electrically identical (except that AAUI doesn't provide 12V) so you might as well butcher the non-rare hardware.

I can send you a couple for experimental purposes if you like.

Well, that would be super helpful if you dont mind

 

[cheesestraws]

Well, that would be super helpful if you dont mind

Don't mind at all - I ended up with a box of 20 of them some time ago because it was cheaper than buying 4 (?!) so I'm happy to bung a few in your direction. DM me where to send them and I'll get 'em in the post.

 

[jmacz]

The sleep function hasn't been working out for me. I've had also sorts of weird issues when the system sleeps, but the most common is that it fails to come out of sleep. Power comes back, but it gets stuck on a gray screen.

I've tried both System 7.1.1 and System 7.5.5 with the same problem.

I am using a ZuluSCSI 1.1 Laptop version updated to the latest firmware. I did try a spinning disk instead and that works! So it seems like something related to the ZuluSCSI when going into or coming out of sleep.

Need to add this to my list of things to debug.

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

This is probably to do with the computer telling the drive to spin up/spin down, at least that would be my guess. Try something real quick - go to the control strip and select the option to spin down the hard disk. See if it locks up on doing that, or if it locks up when it tries to "spin the disk back up" again. If it is, then I'd guess the sleep issue is related. Not sure though. These sort of problems seem to be chronic on the solid state drive replacements, they at least also affect the BlueSCSI, but only for some people. Humph.

 

[jmacz]

This is probably to do with the computer telling the drive to spin up/spin down, at least that would be my guess. Try something real quick - go to the control strip and select the option to spin down the hard disk. See if it locks up on doing that, or if it locks up when it tries to "spin the disk back up" again. If it is, then I'd guess the sleep issue is related. Not sure though. These sort of problems seem to be chronic on the solid state drive replacements, they at least also affect the BlueSCSI, but only for some people. Humph.

Good test.

Just tried it. Spun it down using the control strip. Things were still fine. But then when I tried to access something on the drive, it locked up. Sounds like what you're saying might be correct.

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

Yep, perhaps. It may be related or may not, but in any case, the freezing related to spinning the drive down and up seems to be a chronic problem on both ZuluSCSIs and BlueSCSIs. My 170 with a BlueSCSI V2 does the same thing and it's quite frustrating. I *think* that you can turn automatic spin-down off on newer versions of Mac OS (7.5+ maybe?), but I run 7.1 on my 170 for speed and you can't there as far as I can tell. If I'm ever playing a long game that doesn't access the drive often enough that the system "spins it down", it will lock up. I've honestly got no clue why either dev group hasn't managed to fix this yet, it's been brought up many times before.

 

[jmacz]

I spent some time working on a program using my 540c last night. This was under battery power. It looked like it was going to last quite a bit longer than I expected... perhaps around 2hrs for one of the two batteries and maybe 2.5hrs for the other (one seems stronger than the other one). Still shy of the 3-4 hours per battery that was originally advertised by Apple I believe? Unclear why these rebuilds would last shorter than that but it's also a function of what Apple was doing when they tested their run times - I was actually flipping between applications, developing code, etc.

Now that said, I did after extended use see a problem last night. After the laptop was warm (about an hour), I experienced a complete lock up. No cursor movement, screen was frozen, etc. I have MacsBug installed but it didn't drop into it so I don't think it's a software crash. I had to pull both batteries to reboot. About 10 minutes later, it happened again. Pulled both batteries and rebooted. Another 15 minutes and it happened again. I then booted up with extensions disabled. Another 10 minutes and it froze again. So not an extension issue.

My first guess was perhaps it's the overclocked CPU? (40MHz instead of 33MHz)? But on a whim, I tried leaving out the left battery (the weaker of the two). So it was running on the right (stronger) battery. No lock ups after that.

Hmm...

This morning I did a power manager reset (leave completely power free for 3-5 minutes, then hold ctrl+option+command+power key for 10 seconds). And then I put both batteries in and fully charged them.

Then went on battery power with both batteries in and started using the laptop again as I did last night. I'm now 2+ hours in and no freezes.

Not sure what happened here. Will have to take some more notes if I see it again.

The 540c is running System 7.1.1 with System Update 3.

 

[jmacz]

Still getting some strange lock ups from time to time. I've removed the overclocking to see if it helps.

As part of futzing around with this, I noticed some other strange behavior.

Tried installing AfterDark (versions 2, 3, and 4). On my desktop machines, the animation from the screen savers (like Flying Toasters or Warp) is smooth and stays smooth indefinitely.

On my PowerBook 540c, the animation is smooth for around 15 seconds and after that it starts stuttering, some times gets stuck for long pauses before resuming. It's not just the animation but the sound effects too, they stop at the same time as the animation. If I break out of the screen saver and then go back in, it's fine again for about 15 seconds before stuttering. If I leave the screen saver on long enough (like 15+ minutes) in its stuttering state, when I break out of the screen saver, it redraws the Finder, and then is stuck there (mouse movement but nothing else) for a while and then eventually it seems to "catch up" with the events and all the mouse clicks/etc I had done while stuck fire off and then it resumes normal operation -- it's as if an event queue was stuck and events were piling up behind it.

Saw this same behavior across:

• With/without expanded memory module.
• With/without the overclocking.
• With a slower 25Mhz CPU card instead of the stock 33MHz one.
• Vanilla install of System 7.5.5 (outside of AfterDark).
• Vanilla install of System 7.1.1 (outside of AfterDark).
• With/without batteries.
• On battery power or on plugged in power.
• With/without cache compatibility mode enabled.

I'm guessing it's something with AfterDark specifically but was toying with this thinking it might be related to my random lock ups but maybe not.

 

[croissantking]

As part of futzing around with this, I noticed some other strange behavior.

Tried installing AfterDark (versions 2, 3, and 4). On my desktop machines, the animation from the screen savers (like Flying Toasters or Warp) is smooth and stays smooth indefinitely.

All my 68k PowerBooks do this. I want to say it's something like processor cycling, but I'm not sure that's what it is because I think I have this disabled. It does seem like a feature though, or a side effect of a feature that might be to do with energy saving.

 

[jmacz]

Ah ok. Well, I can stop worrying about that then thanks for the confirmation.

 

[jmacz]

I'm going to leave the stock crystal in for now and see if the problem goes away. It only happens after being on for a while which is why I thought perhaps the overclocking was causing overheating. I had run MacBench tests when I first overclocked with no issues -- because I think @croissantking you had some stability issues after overclocking right? Lets see what happens.