This PowerBook 5300c is not so much a conquest as the rebirth of a conquest. The machine came to me several months ago with the usual broken power connector, and has been left on a shelf in storage since then, but was disassembled in order to be soldered back together last night.
I fixed it fine, as this is not a big challenge by any means, but an appalling mish-mash awaited me on start-up, in an installation of MacOS 8.6 with all sorts of pieces missing (a typical example is the Control Strip left "functional" at the bottom of the screen but with all the modules removed. Duh.) It was also very slow under the 8.6 installation, such as it was.
So I installed MacOS 8.1 just to see how it behaved itself and am rather pleased to see how fleet of foot 8.1 is on this machine. The 40MB of RAM included doesn't hurt for these purposes.
My only other 5300 is the 5300cs, with passive matrix screen, and it has to be said that the 5300cs is a little disappointing in use. The 5300c active matrix screen (640x480 at 256 colours), by contrast, makes for a pretty good machine (for a 5300). If I can convince the battery to revive (am cycling it now), it will likely become a FileMaker platform for my library database. It is just the right size to sit conveniently on a shelf among the books, having the advantage of being compact, so as to tell me where things are. The idea is to replace an earlier PowerBook model presently doing that service, but that is having battery problems.
I fixed it fine, as this is not a big challenge by any means, but an appalling mish-mash awaited me on start-up, in an installation of MacOS 8.6 with all sorts of pieces missing (a typical example is the Control Strip left "functional" at the bottom of the screen but with all the modules removed. Duh.) It was also very slow under the 8.6 installation, such as it was.
So I installed MacOS 8.1 just to see how it behaved itself and am rather pleased to see how fleet of foot 8.1 is on this machine. The 40MB of RAM included doesn't hurt for these purposes.
My only other 5300 is the 5300cs, with passive matrix screen, and it has to be said that the 5300cs is a little disappointing in use. The 5300c active matrix screen (640x480 at 256 colours), by contrast, makes for a pretty good machine (for a 5300). If I can convince the battery to revive (am cycling it now), it will likely become a FileMaker platform for my library database. It is just the right size to sit conveniently on a shelf among the books, having the advantage of being compact, so as to tell me where things are. The idea is to replace an earlier PowerBook model presently doing that service, but that is having battery problems.
