PowerBook 1400s are Great!

I've been repairing my way through a huge pile of laptops I bought from my friend John @ Roadkill, Inc.  It's been alot of fun since I got to start in with the actual repairs.  I'm not just cleaning and organizing them anymore.

I've been moving up in age from oldest to youngest.  Last time, I blogged about the 5300s.  This next lot of computers I had was 1400 machines...

I brought 4 machines into this round of the project.  These, like the 5300s have been really great to work on.  I already have a 3400, a follow up machine to this machine, which I have worked on a bit.  These are from the pre iFixit era, there are not detailed tear-downs for these machines at that site, which I usually prefer over videos when I'm working a project like this, but having watched a few relevant YouTube videos, and with a bit of experience from the 3400, I started in.

I was able to get two machines running out of the four.  The first is a 1400cs with a passive matrix color screen...

This passive matrix screen is easier to use and has better viewing angles than many I've used.  It's still not great, but I think it's "best in class" for passive matrix.

By combining RAM modules from the various machines, I was able to bring this up to 52MB RAM.  It's IDE HDD was dead, so I replaced it with a larger drive from another machine.  As you can see, the speaker grill is missing, so I've got that on the wish list for later.

I purchased an HDI 30 Pin SCSI adapter on eBay so that I could use a ZIP drive with my old portable Macintosh computers.  It's fantastic to have access to Bootable SCSI Zip drives on everything from my PowerBook 145B up to the G3 PowerBooks that were the last to have SCSI Built in.  Taking a page from Adrian Black's book, I've setup a series of bootable ZIP disks with various versions of Mac OS on them...

I can take a non bootable system with a functioning HDD, boot off the Zip drive, format the HDD, and copy over a working system disk with very little effort.  Building this library has been a timesaver for this project and will be a great tool to have going forward.  This is especially important for the 1400s and earlier machines, because these laptops don't come with an Internal CD-ROM option.

But, back to the 1400s.  The second running system I got was a 1400c, with an Active Matrix screen...

This machine has the faster 133 Mhz processor and 56 MB RAM, the original HDD still works, so it's only a 750 MB drive, but more than enough for my purposes.

I put Mac OS 8.1 on both of these machines, and they run great.  They really are a significant step up from the 5300 in terms of quality, it was noticeable in doing the repairs.  They just look and feel alot better than the 5300, even after just a few hours of use doing Mac OS installs.  I'm quite pleased to have these in the collection and I plan to clean them up a bit more as they still have some of the scuffs and scratches on the outside of the case.

These are the first of the PowerBooks that I have which use the larger 9mm Barrel Jack Power Supply.  These 24V power supplies were used up through the Clamshell G3 iBooks, so these 1400 machines could be powered using the early Yo-Yo power adapters.  Although the 1400 originally shipped with a lower capacity Power Supply, the M4896 Power Supply is the correct color, and a bit more flexible since it provides 45 Watts.  I was able to get a couple of these from a friend of mine that volunteers at Free Geek Twin Cities, so I'm a bit closer to the goal of having one Power Supply for every working computer.  These are becoming more and more expensive on Fleabay, so I may have to resort to a hack like this.  Stay tuned, I've already started on the Wallstreet G3s, and after I get the Pismos up on the workbench then I'll have a better handle on how many power supplies I need to find.