• Hello MLAers! We've re-enabled auto-approval for accounts. If you are still waiting on account approval, please check this thread for more information.

PowerBook 550c

NeverGoBack88

NeverGoBack88

6502
Well, having beaten up freudling's The Elusive PowerBook 550c topic more than I had planned to, (apologies there) I just bit the bullet and purchased a tested known-working M1893 AC Power Adapter on eBay. We'll see what happens... if it turns out to be the "magic" bullet, I may or may not decide to relist it. This "new economy" makes both of these decisions much more difficult. I do have the space and a tolerant significant other, but on the other hand could use the dough. If anyone here was one of the 12 watchers, I'd be interested to hear thoughts and comments. What I've heard from a variety of sources thus far, including questions asked but not posted to the listing, are all over the proverbial map. And thanks for everyone's help this past week, this forum is a great resource.

 
With my neck in a brace from the whiplash I got when I opened the mailbox earlier this afternoon to discover the replacement AC adapter I'd bought on eBay on Saturday had arrived(!), I am sitting here running a standard U.S. English installation of OS 7.5 on this 550c from the 12-disk set (dated 1994) it came with in addition to the 27-disk Japanese OS it's made for. So obviously, the adapter is the solution (at this point) to at least the primary problem. I won't know if there are other issues until I am working in an OS whose language I can actually read. As in the Fall, when it was running after I first got it, the screen backlight seemed to go off on a consistently quick interval. I'm not sure if this may be some display setting in the Japanese OS or some wacky 3rd party extension for saving battery power (it's on the AC adapter), or something else that's problematic. It hasn't happened at all during this floppy-disk booted installation. Was just looking thru my Color Classic running 7.5.3 and the jury is still out, there are some OS items that must have been trashed by the previous owner. And I am now reminded that there are two very slight nicks on the screen plastic in the lower 1/3, not horrible but slightly noticeable on an even-valued background pattern, which is Installer gray at the moment. And that the very top corners (1/2" square) are slightly darkened, - is this perhaps darkening from the heat of the backlight source over time?

The installer just asked for Disk 6... Disk 7 is the last of the regular installation, after that it's PowerTalk and QuickDraw GX which I think I'll skip for now while I'm ahead.

I might not be editing my signature quite as soon as I thought...

 
Success! :) :) :)

This thing is sitting here with a clean install of OS 7.5 just purring away! Lost the RAMDoubler app in the process, might have that somewhere amidst my vintage software, but there's now only 70.5MB on the HD with 688MB free space. What a surprise! As they say, 98% of the time it's a software issue, although a week ago I'd never have believed it. The quickly-fading-screen issue has not reoccurred since the J1 OS, so assumedly that was due to some wacky extension from the original owner. Now to find some disk utility & maintenance software and clean up the hidden messes...

 
Well, today the 550c started up just fine as it did yesterday. Unfortunately, the random fade out (and restore) of the screen backlight is still with it. No rhyme or reason to it. I rebuilt the desktop and then ran Norton Disk Utilities 3.5 from an original boot floppy (still good after all these years) and fixed the usual host of small issues like dates & times due to the dead clock battery, bad icons etc, and a couple more major ones regarding directory clutter and issues. All went without a hitch. Also installed ClarisWorks 4.0 from floppies just for fun and that went as it should. Finally, trashed the remainder of small apps and utilities that were Japanese versions. So I think it's time to use this everyday and see what happens...

 
My 2400c had something similar with its backlight after I restored it. I assume that it had not run for several years before I did the surgery needed.

I found that regular use seemed to cure it of whatever ailed it. Glad to hear that the 550c lives again.

 
My 2400c had something similar with its backlight after I restored it. I assume that it had not run for several years before I did the surgery needed.  

I found that regular use seemed to cure it of whatever ailed it. Glad to hear that the 550c lives again.
Click to expand...
Hey Man, thanks for that! That's encouraging! We'll see! I'm going to get my head wrapped around Macs circa 1994-96 (an era throughout which I simply used my PB170 for y-e-a-r-s... having skipped OS 7.5 in daily use and gone from the 7.1 PB170 right to 7.6 on a PowerComputing desktop in 1997.) and set this up a little bit better in its heyday as best I can for cheap. It's pretty cool now that it's easier to do things in English. Discovered that the left side SHIFT key needs to be pressed pretty hard to make contact, might check under there and see if there's much gradoo. Thanks again for all of your encouragement!

cheers!

 
My 2400c had something similar with its backlight after I restored it. I assume that it had not run for several years before I did the surgery needed.  

I found that regular use seemed to cure it of whatever ailed it. Glad to hear that the 550c lives again.
Click to expand...
Hey beachycove, more good news and a little surprising too I guess, - at least I wouldn't have expected all these things in the course of a week. Your positing that regular use seemed to cure your 2400c ailments has applied to this 550c in several ways. After days and days of gentle daily use, indeed, the fading screen backlight issue seems to have now disappeared completely. In addition, the Control Strip's battery charge indicator bars have reappeared! Ever since doing a clean install of OS 7.5 early last week, they never appeared. Of course, the batteries are very old and even though the charge indicator bars quickly went to "full", they barely keep it running long enough after pulling the AC power cord to render the typical message about going to sleep in 10 seconds. Then yesterday, for the first time, the date & time and the brightness/contrast settings were retained even after being shut down with the AC power cord removed for a couple hours. We get severe thunderstorms at this time of year, so the ritual of shutting everything down and unplugging everything occurs sometimes several times daily, inadvertently creating another "test". It's hard to believe that the clock battery is playing ball at any level after all this time, we'll see. Anyway, I appreciated your encouragement very much.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top