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This year was my 4th time at the VCF East Swap Meet in Wall, NJ. As usual, I left with a bunch of cheap vintage laptops to repair and enjoy! We'll start with the Macs: PowerBook G3 Pismo: Yep, finally got one. It's a 400MHz unit, HDD has been upgraded to 60GB. Seller says it works. Cosmetics...

Drop everything and recap that 840AV's logic board! The traces on those boards are tiny and seem to be very easily damaged by the cap goo. Lucky that yours is still functional pre-recap - that's a score.

Only some of them, and good luck finding one that’s guaranteed to work. For 90% of cases, I find SD adapters work just as well, and SD cards are a lot cheaper than CF (and faster). CF works well if you find the right cards, but I’ve had terrible luck with that.

The main issue with the Kanga (and likely why Apple never supported OS X on it) is that it lacks 3D accelerated graphics, which OS X really needs. All the later G3s use ATI 3D graphics, while the Kanga uses the Chips & Technologies 65554 chip (the 3400c uses the 65550 which is similar but a bit...

Still worth checking the inverter just in case. I have it marked that I don’t know whether the 250 inverter has any electrolytics or not.

The 140, 145, 145B, and 170 all use the same motherboard, so the CPU cards from all of them are cross compatible. Same goes for the 160, 165, and the 180. I think the 165c and 180c cards are different from the regular 160 and 180.

603 will run OS X with XPostFacto. That only goes for PCI based systems though, so no OS X on a PowerBook 1400 or a Performa 6200CD.

I guess this means that I can attempt to install OS X on my PowerBook 3400c. It has 48MB.

My LTE Lite 4/25E which I baked regressed last I had checked. Maybe I'll do another test today. My oven isn't very precise so I think the temperature may have been a little too low. I saw improvement after like 4-6 hours of baking, but not much.

It jumps from something to 100%, and similarly will drop from some % to 0 when discharging. I just don’t know why I’d be having the same problem with both batteries - I don’t remember the exact temp when it jumps to 100, but I don’t think it was too warm.

This is the 15V 1A supply that you (or someone) recommended for VBATT.

Very weird then how these both do about 40 minutes each. I have no clue what’s up with that. The first pack has no errors in the memory, second one has a single uncorrectable error but still works seemingly as expected (aside from the low runtime)

I finally built a second battery tonight with the mystery EMM I got from EvieSigma at the VCF Swap Meet nearly a year ago. It works! The usual assortment of tools complain of an uncorrectable error in the EPROM, but it charges and discharges just fine. The only problem - it lasts exactly as...

Not so much anymore, often the cap goo destroys the bottom row driver’s ribbon cable. In that case you’d still see the upper half of the screen. If you’re seeing nothing, chances are it’s that missing voltage if the rest of the computer seems to work.

Well, it’s still the row driver, just half of it. Bad line somewhere. If you're lucky, maybe there's a bad trace that isn't inside the ribbon. Take a close up photo of that bottom ribbon and look for any black spots (corrosion).

The row driver has either failed, or the traces inside that ribbon cable have been corroded by the leaking capacitors. This bottom row going out on PB100 screens is now very common due to the corrosion, and unfortunately there really isn't a way to fix it.

I didn't remove any parts, although in my case the clips for the bottom drive bezel were already broken when I received the unit.

This is how I got my 5400 home from VCF.