Hey ya'll, I had recently picked up a Powerbook 540C with a NuPower 167mhz PowerPC 603ev for about 100 bucks. It with 8mb of ram on board and 32 mb of ram slotted in for a total of 40 megs. It has a old 500mb hard drive that ran for one final time, just long enough for me to test it, before giving up the ghost. I ordered a blueSCSI powerbook edition to replace the failing drive, which will be here next week or so. It's in really good condition and came with a rev C PCMCIA expansion slot.
My question is, what should I do with this machine in terms of maintenance, I've heard mixed accounts, so to my knowledge, here's a rough outline
1. Recap the board, standard for most all vintage macs, But I'm unsure of if the powerbook 540C has any or if they are tantalums, or whether the lcd board has any.
2. Replace the hard drive with the bluescsi, again, pretty standard.
3. remove the PRAM battery, I heard these can leak over time, and to my knowledge they are rechargabe? However I'm unsure of what I need to replace it with or what part number it is, or where it's even located. I think it's part number 616-0021 and it's somewhere near the trackpad assembly.
4. MAYBE rebuild the batteries, this is a separate project and not a high priority for me due to my lack of free time.
Is there any think else I'm missing, has anybody done this kind of repair before? Or have a list of the capacitors and their values? I really don't want to take this thing apart multiple times due to it's brittle plastics. So if I can do all of this in one go, I'd love to.
My question is, what should I do with this machine in terms of maintenance, I've heard mixed accounts, so to my knowledge, here's a rough outline
1. Recap the board, standard for most all vintage macs, But I'm unsure of if the powerbook 540C has any or if they are tantalums, or whether the lcd board has any.
2. Replace the hard drive with the bluescsi, again, pretty standard.
3. remove the PRAM battery, I heard these can leak over time, and to my knowledge they are rechargabe? However I'm unsure of what I need to replace it with or what part number it is, or where it's even located. I think it's part number 616-0021 and it's somewhere near the trackpad assembly.
4. MAYBE rebuild the batteries, this is a separate project and not a high priority for me due to my lack of free time.
Is there any think else I'm missing, has anybody done this kind of repair before? Or have a list of the capacitors and their values? I really don't want to take this thing apart multiple times due to it's brittle plastics. So if I can do all of this in one go, I'd love to.
