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Hello all! I've just pushed an update to my website, MacDat, which among other things includes a large collection of nearly 1GB of Apple Service Source repair manuals. These were mostly pretty easy to find. The majority were up on applerepairmanuals, but there are a few missing that I had to go...

I tried to rebuild two PowerBook 500 Series batteries. What could go wrong? Well, I didn't light anything on fire which is a good start, but I don't have working batteries either. I used pre-built 8-cell AA NiMH packs that @jmacz on 68kmla already used successfully on his own rebuilds. Both...

Hello to anyone who's reading this! I run MacDat, a website dedicated to preserving online info on vintage Macintosh hardware, and on vintage PC Laptop hardware. My eventual very long-term goal is to document just about every laptop released in the 1990s. Who knows if I'll ever get there, but...

I bought a IIsi recapped at the VCF Swap Meet back in June. It worked fine when I got it, but a while later while I was playing some Tetris on it, it shut off. Now, it will start if I unplug the hard drive (known good), but can't get itself started with it installed. It will start, chime, start...

Title. It’s in a PowerBook 170, System 7.1 and I can’t see any way to make it not spin down the drive in that version. Is there any fix for this? I can’t play Tetris properly, or leave it for more than a couple minutes or it locks up. Otherwise, I’m happy with the device. Have seen this brought...

I bought a fixer upper IIsi from the VCF East swap meet in June. Had been recapped already but was missing any RAM expansion, the floppy drive is dead, and it had no hard drive. I’ve since maxed out the RAM, bought and assembled a BlueSCSI V2 for it, and verified the BlueSCSI worked on my 7100...

I had a burst of inspiration this evening and spent a few hours putting both my novice web design and novice photoshop skills to work on a whole styling facelift for my website, and this was the result: https://macdat.net/index_test.html I personally think it turned out really well for the...

I’ve got an original AEK with a bad left shift key. I took the assembly apart and noticed some corrosion in one area and I cleaned it up. Two traces are bad and I traced one of them back to said left shift key, great! The other leads to an option key. So I traced the trace all the way to a pin...

I'm working on getting cap reference values for various PowerBook Duo laptops for my website. The 270c is an 030 Duo so I assumed that it would have the same logic board as the 210/230/250 but I've seen conflicting info elsewhere, mainly, an older thread with some incomplete photos that shows...

Continuing the discussion from the Q650 thread. So from what I know - System 7.5 killed off system identifiers in the about this Mac page. However, from my experience getting copies of the original customized OS back on a few of my PowerBooks, they stuck around a bit longer. At least up until...

Anyone got this one? There's no dump whatsoever on the garden or anywhere else as far as I can tell. The floppy copy is out there but I have seen eBay listings before for a CD-ROM, so I know it exists but is likely rare. May ask Fahrenheit over on 68kMLA if he's go it too.

Looking to replace the generic copy of 7.6.1 on my 3400 with the personalized one, but the dump of the disk on macintoshgarden isn't properly dumped for mounting on the classic Mac OS. I need to be able to do this (upload to my PiSCSI and mount over emulated CD-ROM). The copy out there is a...

I recently bought a couple of WinBook 486 laptops off of eBay. In the process of getting them working, I ended up looking into finding more information about them, but could find only a couple mentions of them on Google, and no real info about what they were. In fact, there was hardly any info...

If you don't know, it's possible to install a 1024x768 resolution display in an iBook Clamshell with a special LCD cable and an open firmware command to get everything set. I've heard conflicting info on whether this is possible on an original 4MB VRAM model (Blueberry/Tangerine), which happen...

I’ve been planning on rebuilding two PowerBook 500 series battery packs soon, and unfortunately I’ve run into a couple issues. The good news is I have enough good parts to build one working pack. 1 fully intact EMM board and membrane, and an intact fuse. The bad news is the other EMM ribbon is...

Just arrived from eBay, seems pretty uncommon. Worked perfect when I got it, booted up into Windows 3.1 and besides both shift keys seeming to not work, it was running great. Then I opened it up to remove the CMOS battery, which as I suspected was indeed a Varta pack that had begun to leak down...

Well this is officially the find of the year so far. 240MHz PowerBook 3400c, for FREE!!! It was a bit beat up, bad keyboard, wonky hinges, missing a drive module and the HDD Cable (and HDD) but shockingly the PRAM battery hadn’t wrecked the logic board and it works! I have another one in...

Hey folks! I just finished up and posted a video detailing my recent restoration of a PowerBook 100 laptop. Let me know what you think! I also did a similar video a few months back on the PowerBook 145, so here's a link to that if you're interested:

I’ve got an F4lite BlueSCSI in my 180c PowerBook and it works just fine when nothing’s hooked up to the SCSI port, but when I have my RaSCSI (or is it PiSCSI now?) hooked up for file transfer, all of a sudden the BlueSCSI acts dead. The RaSCSI is recognized, so if I have a bootable volume...

The best worst PowerBook? Well I've got one now. 33MHz 030 8MB RAM "beautiful" passive matrix 4-bit grayscale LCD upgraded 1GB hard drive (the original quantum was of course dead) NO PRAM battery damage! It's been replaced at some point, seems to even work maybe? Will probably remove it anyway...