New Powerbook 520C owner

[Lastic]

Good morning everybody,

Short intro , previous Powerbook G4 collector since 2016 and Atari ST fanatic.
Living in Belgium.

After having found a Powerbook 145B last year and in the spirit of MARCHintosh I stumbled on a very good looking 520C on eBAY
and decided to take the plunge.

I wanted a bit more processor oomph , more RAM expandability and a 256 color screen.

The machine is in exceptional state for its age, plastics and the hinge are perfect.
Just a broken corner but not so bad.
Screen is also in a very good state so very happy with it .
Opened it to install my BlueSCSI (from the PB145B) with System 7.1 and it has an 4 MB RAM expansion so currently a total of 8MB RAM.

I found an 8MB RAM expansion card on eBAY that should arrive this week.

Reviving the battery with the Apple Intelligent software , EMMPathy and Lind BU 500 has so far been non succesfull.
Put the battery in the freezer last night , let's see if that awakens it.
From what I can tell visually on the outside of the battery and the insides of the 520C there is no leakage.

Altough the machine came from France , there were a lot of personal documents of a French company on the internal harddisk the actual keyboard
is QWERTZU (German).

Anybody willing to part/sell me a QWERTY keyboard and ship it to Europe (Belgium) ?

Apart from the RAM upgrade and BlueSCSI any other expansions that are available and make the machine even more capable of
exploring the 2026 world ? Not looking into upgrading it to a PowerPC.

custom-build battery ?
hooking it up to wired Ethernet via the AAUI although is 10Mbit worth it vs the DaynaPort BlueSCSI Wifi ?
PCMCIA is probably rare to find ?
getting it hooked up to a CENTRONICS EPSON dot-matrix printer ?

 

[Byrd]

Hi Lastic,

Looks great nice pickup. I've never found a 5x0 battery alive in all my years of collecting, even with restoration. There are some guides on here listing various success with replacement cells but hard to get right.

The PCMCIA adapter fetches a pretty penny if found loose. I'd look out for a 540c display which is a straight swap of the lid. Note there is a large capacitor near the charging jack that requires replacement usually.

JB

 

[finkmac]

screen needs a recap

don't bother trying to wake up the pack, it's almost definitely full of leaking NiCad cells. remove them and clean the electronics thoroughly before trying to do anything with it.

i wouldn't change the keyboard, the non-qwerty keyboard is less common after all.

it's a laptop from 1994, not much you can do other than upgrade the memory... and do some hinge lubrication reinforcement/repair

you can try a battery rebuild, but in all likelihood the bms is pickled from the leaking batteries.

AAUI is rather nice... the zulu-compatible daynaport emulation is pretty middling in my experience. awful to configure, awful range.

PCMCIA is "rare", by which I mean the wifi-compatible one everyone wants is very hard to find.

"CENTRONICS EPSON dot-matrix printer" is vague, you're probably talking about a parallel port printer... you'd need a PowerPrint adapter or something like it.

 

[Paralel]

screen needs a recap

don't bother trying to wake up the pack, it's almost definitely full of leaking NiCad cells. remove them and clean the electronics thoroughly before trying to do anything with it.

i wouldn't change the keyboard, the non-qwerty keyboard is less common after all.

it's a laptop from 1994, not much you can do other than upgrade the memory... and do some hinge lubrication reinforcement/repair

you can try a battery rebuild, but in all likelihood the bms is pickled from the leaking batteries.

AAUI is rather nice... the zulu-compatible daynaport emulation is pretty middling in my experience. awful to configure, awful range.

PCMCIA is "rare", by which I mean the wifi-compatible one everyone wants is very hard to find.

"CENTRONICS EPSON dot-matrix printer" is vague, you're probably talking about a parallel port printer... you'd need a PowerPrint adapter or something like it.

If I remember correctly the Blackbird batteries are NiMH rather than NiCad

For the OP, if you just want PCMCIA, you can get a Rev B. card cage (PCMCIA bay module), they are much less than the Rev. C card cages as those are the ones that allow for WiFi.

 

[Lastic]

Thank you all for your feedbacks so far.

Some responses from my end

screen recapping is not in my capabilities, the screenshot from eBAY doesn't do the screen justice, when I adjust the inital contrast and brightness it is rather good to my "old" eyes.

As much as I can type blindly on AZERTY and QWERTY and partially on QWERTZU , I would still rather prefer a QWERTY keyboard.
For the time being System 7.1 is on US QWERTY layout typing on the QWERTZU keyboard.

Will look for an AAUI 10Base-T adapter to pop up , for now the speeds I get from the PicoW on the BlueSCSI Daynaport are good enough to use it for Netscape browsing and doing FTP from the machine using Fetch.

Will still give it a try reviving the battery that came with it , to be continued

For PCMCIA will keep an eye out then for a Rev.B cage.

Yes I meant a parallel port EPSON dot-matrix printer which has a CENTRONICS port , will look into the PowerPrint adapter.
( I come from a Colecovision ADAM , PC XT background during my teens )

Having never owned a Macintosh until my first black Macbook in 2011 (the 2006 model) I plan to have some off-line,slower-retro-fun discovering time-period correct software on it and will probably lug it around to retro-events here in Europe.

 

[finkmac]

screen recapping is not in my capabilities, the screenshot from eBAY doesn't do the screen justice, when I adjust the inital contrast and brightness it is rather good to my "old" eyes.

it's not a question of whether it "looks good", it's a question of time. the leaking fluid can and WILL leak onto the display ribbon connectors and cause catastrophic damage. I have several thinkpad panels that were damaged in this manner. if you can't recap it, you must find someone who can... or you're on borrowed time.

there's also a capacitor on the logic board that should be removed or replaced, read that macdat page