Powerbook 5300c find
I came across this powerbook on craigslist a couple days ago, cosmetically it looked to be in decent shape, but it was untested because the power brick was missing. She wanted $20 for it, but since the posting was up for nearly a month now and I really didn't want to spend $20, I was able to talk her down to $10.
When I picked it up, I was a little surprised to see how nice the condition of it was. There really isn't a scratch on it, all I really had to do was clean it up a little bit. There is a little bit of wear on the trackpad, but the keyboard has practically no wear. It also had a combo ethernet and 28.8k modem card in one of the PCMCIA slots, it will probably be tossed in my electronics tote. I snapped a couple of pictures after I cleaned it: http://imgur.com/a/6j5kH
After I found my torx set, I opened it up. I took out the clock battery while I was in there, probably going to price out a new one if it works. Looking at the dates inside, it looks like it was sold in mid to late 1995 and it looks like Apple refurbished it around mid to late 1997. Also saw some signs of a previous battery leaking, though it looks like it was caught in time as it really didn't cause any real damage and the battery that's in there now is an aftermarket replacement that hasn't started leaking yet. Also saw a 32MB Kingston aftermarket RAM module installed, so it should have 40 or 48MB in total (I know there's onboard RAM, didn't take a look to see how much was present).
After seeing nothing of concern internally, I took another risk and ordered up a known working power brick off ebay. If it doesn't work, it would be a great parts machine anyway, though I'm hoping it works. It would be a pretty nice example to play around with if it does. Also a little curious to see what's on the hard drive (hopefully any personal information was taken off years ago, but unlikely).
I'll make an update whenever I get the brick in, fingers crossed!
When I picked it up, I was a little surprised to see how nice the condition of it was. There really isn't a scratch on it, all I really had to do was clean it up a little bit. There is a little bit of wear on the trackpad, but the keyboard has practically no wear. It also had a combo ethernet and 28.8k modem card in one of the PCMCIA slots, it will probably be tossed in my electronics tote. I snapped a couple of pictures after I cleaned it: http://imgur.com/a/6j5kH
After I found my torx set, I opened it up. I took out the clock battery while I was in there, probably going to price out a new one if it works. Looking at the dates inside, it looks like it was sold in mid to late 1995 and it looks like Apple refurbished it around mid to late 1997. Also saw some signs of a previous battery leaking, though it looks like it was caught in time as it really didn't cause any real damage and the battery that's in there now is an aftermarket replacement that hasn't started leaking yet. Also saw a 32MB Kingston aftermarket RAM module installed, so it should have 40 or 48MB in total (I know there's onboard RAM, didn't take a look to see how much was present).
After seeing nothing of concern internally, I took another risk and ordered up a known working power brick off ebay. If it doesn't work, it would be a great parts machine anyway, though I'm hoping it works. It would be a pretty nice example to play around with if it does. Also a little curious to see what's on the hard drive (hopefully any personal information was taken off years ago, but unlikely).
I'll make an update whenever I get the brick in, fingers crossed!
Comments
It is currently running Mac OS 8.5.1 and the hard drive was filled with personal data. I won't go into much detail with what I found, but I will say the the previous owner worked in the bursar's office of MIT and I had access to things from personal emails to full student records. There was definitely enough information on that drive to cause MIT some real headaches, but since I'm not a complete asshole, I spent the time to remove all that shit off the drive.
But getting back on track, the screen looks amazingly good considering the age of the laptop and the drive sounds healthy. The drive itself is the original 800MB drive made by IBM. As for the RAM, I was also dead wrong about there being on-board RAM, so all it has is the 32MB card. As for what I am going to do now I know it works, first thing I will probably do is put in a new clock battery.
I'm also not really sure if I want to keep it's current operating system on it, I've been considering downgrading it to System 7.5.5, but I'm not sure I really want to. I'm thinking System 7 would run a little better on it than Mac OS 8, though it runs it pretty well. I definitely won't be reinstalling anytime soon if I decide to do it.
Overall, I'm really happy how well it looks and works considering I only paid $10 for the laptop itself. I plan on keeping it for the foreseeable future as I believe this will probably be the nicest example of the Powerbook 5300 series I'll ever own. I'm also probably going to try to find some old games to play on it for fun sometime in the near future.
EDIT: Dead wrong about the RAM a third time, there is actually 16MB on-board plus the 16MB expansion card.
Yes they do, not only do they like to seize but I believe another problem is that they are held in by threaded brass inserts molded into the ABS plastic case. I believe between the ABS plastic shrinking a minute amount and the brass expanding and contracting causes the brass inserts to become loose and eventually break free from the plastic.
Luckily, mine doesn't really have any of those problems yet. I'll probably oil the hinge eventually to prevent it from causing problems, but that's a project for a later date.
Funny thing is, some of the developers probably felt the same way about the lack of a decent emulators and then they got the idea to make their own.
Mini vMac, and, to some degree, Basilisk II are good. Basilisk II has problems w/stability, but not as bad as SheepShaver. It probably has to do with the fact that Mac OS 9 is bigger and more complex.
Play some classic games on it. I actually used my old powerbook to write journal entries for a personal journal for the longest time. Transferred stuff over with a compact flash card. Should start using it again, but no real reason to do so.
I actually do want to try that, but most games won't fit on a floppy and I really have no other ways of getting games to it. I have been considering sourcing an external SCSI CD-ROM drive, but there are none locally and ebay prices are too high.
Didn't the Toshiba Satellite C655 Series have a similar problem with the hinges?
Also, I've seen a PowerBook in real life before, they seem to just be typical 90s laptops with the Apple logo stamped on them. They used the same brittle plastic that Compaq and Toshiba used at the time, so they have a tendency to crack.
I *could* go that route, but I think it would create a different problem. I also planned to put System 7.5.5 or OS 8.1 on it, but I'm not sure I could actually boot it off a PCMCIA card. Of course, I could always install 7.5.5 (or even 8.0) off floppy diskettes, but I really don't want to deal with that.
ampharos: It does have PC Exchange installed, though I would probably reformat it for HFS so I don't have to deal with workarounds (not that putting the installer in MacBinary is that hard anyway).
Yes and this one is no exception. The plastic feels very brittle, though there are thankfully no stress cracks yet on this one. This one kinda avoided most of the common problems that have plagued these laptops. I'm pretty sure the 5300 series was known as one of the worst powerbooks ever released because of all the problems these things had.
If that were a SCSI hard drive, Basillisk could actually let you use it directly as a local drive.
I'll give that a whirl on my win2k machine and pick up a cheap laptop to desktop IDE adapter if it works. Thanks for the idea!
Also, quick question, because Basilisk II is a 68k emulator and not a PowerPC emulator, will the Mac OS installer skip over some PowerPC specific files or does it install the same stuff regardless of platform?
Applications might be a different matter.
I've noticed though that many PPC-Only applications will still let you install them when running on a 68K machine. (probably for networking/shared image reasons)
I actually have a PowerMac 7100 here with no CD drive, and that is how I installed MacOS 8.1 on it. I plugged the SCSI drive directly in to my PC and used Basillisk to install MacOS directly on to it. Sadly it can't use IDE drives directly like that, but the "dd" method should always work regardless of interface.