Powerbook 540C with powerPC, What now?

[lsi-aigisx86]

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.

 

[nottomhanks]

Very nice!! I was lucky to find one of these with the 183Mhz version! Super cool that you got the Rev C card cage!! Those are super rare. You can actually run WIFI with the Rev C with the right card and software. I managed to run OS 9 on mine, and I'm working on trying to "slim it down" a bit. It's pretty cool to be able to run OS 7, OS 8 AND OS 9. You could also do it because you have 32Mb (or more) of physical ram.

 

[clay]

The biggest challenge will be the brittle plastic. The bottom of the screen where the back cover and the front connect together will start to break apart with regular use opening and closing the laptop. Luckily there are 3d printable parts that can put it back together. The cover between the monitor and keyboard will also begin to come off. The darker hinge covers will break if you’re not careful if you decide to remove them to take the screen off the base of the machine - you have to squeeze them a bit to get them to come out.

Other than that you’re on the right track. A bluescsi will make the machine silent when operating. I don’t recall too many caps on the mainboard but there are a few on the monitor’s inverter board which can leak. So far neither of my 540s have any leakage.

 

[lsi-aigisx86]

Yea that's my big fear, I wondered if heating the plastics slightly before I pry them apart might make them slightly more easier to work with, not enough to melt them, but better then them being at room temp, the charger I took apart had some parts on the inside that shattered like glass, luckily it still looks fine on the outside, I wanted to inspect it for anything failing on the inside.