Duo 230, DuoDock and a dead (?) Duo 2300!

[superpantoufle]

Hey!

My car's trunk is quite full this morning... I got a working (boxed!) Duo 230 with all its accessories (but sadly without original disks and manuals), a working DuoDock for it (yellowed...), and a said non-functional Duo 2300. I haven't got a chance to play with those, but I got hope the 2300 is easy to fix!

With that I also got a bag full of peripherals. At first sight there's some Duo stuff (small docks from third parties, floppy drives), a Wacom ADB tablet, and some adapters and stuff.

I paid around $20 for the DuoDock and $80 for the 230. That was some money, but they're rare around here, and I really wanted a Duo for a long time! All the other stuff was given to me free from the seller.

 

[beachycove]

Congrats, and a few random thoughts from a fellow Duo fan (working 270c and 2300c; "resting for now" 280c; plus two DuoDocks with replacement lids; plus a separate external battery recharger/conditioner and goodness knows how many parts in bags and boxes). I really bit the Duo bait when it arrived, and was fiddling with my 270c just yesterday.

My Duos will not boot with a bad (dead or shorted) main battery. Take the main battery out and give the 2300c a whirl. You might get lucky.

Duos seem also to be commonly afflicted by GLOD and associated power management issues, though it is by no means as serious a problem in the Duo series as it is in a 2400c (fortunately!). So the power manager may be the source of the trouble, and a working backup battery may well be needed. An advantage in the present instance is that the 2300c is NOT a 2400c, and so if the electronics are viable, you should be able to get it to boot, even if somewhat unreliably.

There are also, as I recall, three or four capacitors (near the power connector) that are not visible until the machine is disassembled that may need to be looked at. Those in my machines seem fine, but as electrolytic capacitor failure is a typical issue in vintage hardware, you ought to know the score. Take special care when disassembling the 2300c, however, as the trackpad cable is easily broken and as it is very hard to find a replacement part. It happens just when you begin to separate the two halves. The cable is unique to the 2300c.

Fortunately, I have managed to scrounge two working backup batteries from parts machines, and the stability of the two Duos that I have running is now excellent. I did need to replace a transformer in my 2300c, a part which I took from a dead 280c logic board; the 2300c also runs from a CF drive, in absolute silence and at a very usable speed (and under MacOS 8.6 at that). I have also successfully re-packed a Type 3 battery with replacement cells, and have a still-working battery from the mid-90s. It is impossible to repack one of these without physically matching the cells, though, as the space is very crowded in a Duo battery.

One of the great things about the Duos is their memory capacity. I think I have 32MB in the 270c and a whopping 56MB, I seem to remember, in the 2300c. So they were limited machines in not having a floppy etc., and yet they were not limited machines in other respects; one way of looking at them is to say that Duos were really designed for use in combination with the DuoDock and so as a sort of "portable desktop" for professional users; hence they were made to accept a good complement of memory. The advertising made clear that this was the intended market, so while you can read on LEM and such about how the Duo was a cut down machine and so forth, in fact it was not. It was a fully functional, expandable desktop in essence, out of which you could take the guts and put it in a briefcase to take home at night. It also wasn't a particular pain to do so, because of the tiny size of the machine; a Duo is about the same size as a 12" PowerBook G4. That was the genius of it, and that is why the DuoDock was marketed with the machine. Those little external floppy drive add-ons and such weren't the real deal, but merely the poor cousins.

I can get around 3 hrs with the repacked battery in the 270c or around 1hr 50mins from the same battery in the 2300c. The 603e @ 100MHz really drinks down the juice; the 68030 is, by contrast, very efficient. The 1990s battery was dead when it came to me, but the usual cycling technique revived it to the extent that it will give me 1hr & 50 mins or so in the 270c (and a little over an hour in the 2300c). You could likely do better - I'd bet 4 hrs or more - with fresh cells in the 230, because of the lower power requirements of the passive-matrix screen. Even with those results, however, I doubt that the real capacity of new cells can be reached, as I don't think that the machine knows quite how to fully charge new, replacement cells (2000ma NiMh cells, e.g., being way beyond the capacities of cells in 1993-5).

So I have invested lots of time in my Duos and really like them. Be sure to check out the Duo commercials from the early 90s on YouTube/Vectronics etc.

And persist with the keyboards. They seem to improve with use. Just don't expect a miracle; "improvement" is a relative term.

 

[Bunsen]

Congratulations on a very complete Duo starter kit there!

I don't think there is much I can add that beachycove hasn't already covered. Except to say that out there somewhere on the web, there are, or used to be, directions for cleaning and repairing Duo keyboards to get the best (least worst?) possible performance out of them.

And if you get completely sick of the keyboard, you have that nice Wacom there for a Duo tablet hack!

 

[superpantoufle]

Wow, beachycove, what a complete answer! Thanks a lot to both of you.

Actually last night I took some time to test those babies, and it seems like it's Christmas all over again!

Look: both the 230 and the 2300c are in pristine cosmetic condition. And the 2300c that was said to have a defective screen actually is in perfect working condition. Both do have a few of those ghost lines you usually get on old LCD screens, but nothing too bad. So I got two Duos, one of the firsts and the last in the serie, in great working condition. The Dock is the first model, work great, and has a 160 Mb hard drive. The beige part of the case is badly yellowed, though. That will add to my "yellow squadron" of prevously beige machines I intend to retrobright sometime…

And among the free stuff I got with, there is three Duo main batteries, a 1xx battery (apparently all dead), four (!) Duo power bricks, two Apple-branded "micro-docks" (floppy and ADB ports), two third-party mini docks with SCSI, floppy, and video ports, two external floppy drives, a PowerBook SCSI adapter (already got a couple of those, but always useful!), some SCSI cables, a couple of video adapters and an Apple AAUI to thin coax ethernet adapter (great, but I had preferred tho other way around!).

You think of a "PowerBook Duo starter kit"!!!

I remember of a friend still using his 2300 on a daily basis in university in the early 2000's, with no accessories but a floppy drive. That was really a vintage setup even for those years, but he didn't see his PowerBook as crippled, but just as a "netbook without the net" he could easily carry around.

 

[superpantoufle]

And as a humorous sidenote, note to self:

Unlike what you read everywhere on the web, you *can* put a 2300c in an original DuoDock, and it works just fine. You only need to push a little harder, but not too much. What you *cannot* do, though, is remove said 2300c from said DuoDock after. ) :lol:

Well, I managed to remove it without scratching the case, but I advise me and anybody else NOT to try that again. Very bad idea. Lesson learn, over.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

And as a humorous sidenote, note to self:Unlike what you read everywhere on the web, you *can* put a 2300c in an original DuoDock, and it works just fine. You only need to push a little harder, but not too much. What you *cannot* do, though, is remove said 2300c from said DuoDock after. ) :lol:

Well, I managed to remove it without scratching the case, but I advise me and anybody else NOT to try that again. Very bad idea. Lesson learn, over.

It works if you take the lid off first.

 

[beachycove]

As I suspect you know, the colour PowerBook Duo screens where marginally thicker than those found on the greyscale models, and so a replacement lid for the original DuoDock was available for those who had invested in the setup but who upgraded to a colour PowerBook Duo once they were released. Otherwise the proud new owner would face a "situation" rather like you did. The problem was, one supposes, due to an oversight in the initial DuoDock design. All the new lid amounted to, so far as I can tell, was a slightly taller and heavier design (for larger monitors).

You could probably achieve much the same thing by trying some modest alterations to the base or lid (even felt padding might work) so as to be able to insert/ remove both machines into/ from the DuoDock, and not be able to tell, really, that any changes had been made. As you have seen, you probably only need to provide an extra 2 or 3 mm. of clearance. You could likely find the exact figure from the spec. sheets.

It is good to hear that your 2300c is working. It is an elegant and surprisingly capable model. Mine runs Office 2001 quite happily, though things can get a trifle cramped on its 640x480 display with that software. Running ClarisWorks 4, it is a rocket.

My personal favourite is the 270c, however, the screen of which is such a gem, and the power management features of which are so much better than those of the later models (e.g., you can halve the speed at which a 68030 PowerBook runs in order to save on battery usage, giving another hour or so of runtime on a charge, which you certainly cannot do on a 68LC040 PowerBook or on any of the 603e PowerBooks — the reduced speed makes virtually no difference if all you are doing is working on text). The machine, nevertheless, is comparable to a PowerBook 180 in capability when running at full tilt, and performs at roughly the same levels in Speedometer tests. Like the 180, it has a 33MHz 68030 + 68882 processor, but unlike the 180, it is capable of taking 32MB of RAM. Using the 270c reminds me very much of working on a SE/30 or similar, since the screen is just as crisp, especially in Black & White (very fast that way, too). I am not sure what the 270c's colour screen was technologically, as it seems to be unique to that model, the 280c, and the 180c, but it isn't one of the TFT screens that soon appeared, became ubiquitous, and that you have on your 2300c. It actually had a glass surface, rather akin to that of the MacBook Pro I am typing on now.

Fabulous, unique and very interesting little machines, the Duos. It's just a crying shame that the keyboards do not perform well.

 

[jruschme]

And among the free stuff I got with, there is three Duo main batteries, a 1xx battery (apparently all dead)

Which version of the Duo batteries (i.e., Type I, II, or III)? Type IIIs are the most problematic with dead ones not even being recognized by the Duo. OTOH, they are also the only version which seems to respond to any real attempt at rejuvenation.

John