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RogerWilco6502

macrumors 68000
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Jan 12, 2019
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Anyone have experience rebuilding batteries for the PowerBook 1400? I want to get into mine to check for battery leakage but I don't know the best way to get the battery casing open.
 
best advise: DON'T.. those batteries then were NICAD I believe and are highly dangerous. Did you try a general search for a used or new battery ?
 
I am not sure how you can open the battery pack. I think it needs a very sharp knife to get the 2 half’s open. Then, i suppose you can get her cells if any are leaking.
 
Got the battery disassembled with a utility knife and someone with a steadier hand than mine. Sadly it is leaking. Not very much though, thankfully.
 
Oh wow.. thats an old world rom based powerbook. I checked mactracker and it shows it has no ports on it, no ethernet port - real bummer dude. So, what does one do with this ? I know its a collector's item, but how did one surf the internet on it back in 1996-1997 - If it makes you happy, I was in my sophmore year at Towson State living in a dorm at that time. In our dorm, I remember we had ethernet connection.. but this PowerBook doesn't have that, so i ASSUME you can connect to internet by 56k modem.
 
Oh wow.. thats an old world rom based powerbook. I checked mactracker and it shows it has no ports on it, no ethernet port - real bummer dude. So, what does one do with this ? I know its a collector's item, but how did one surf the internet on it back in 1996-1997 - If it makes you happy, I was in my sophmore year at Towson State living in a dorm at that time. In our dorm, I remember we had ethernet connection.. but this PowerBook doesn't have that, so i ASSUME you can connect to internet by 56k modem.
Well, it has two PC card slots. So I use a PC card wireless adapter for internet and network access. There are also ethernet cards available though. It has HDI-30 SCSI, ADB, and RS-422 serial onboard. The serial can be used to connect to AppleTalk networks over LocalTalk or alternatively it can be used to connect a modem.

For larger file transfers and such I have a 4GB CF card in a PC card adapter to compliment the 8GB CF card I have as the boot drive. As for what I do with it, the passive matrix screen makes it a little unfeasible to play any games with high action, but I find that it works well for things like SimCity 2000 or Shanghai: Great Moments. Additionally I use it to write up documents, make greeting cards, and really just any sort of fun thing that peaks my curiosity. :)
 
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You must be the guru of the family then when it comes to old world Macs. I don’t own any old world Mac, but I may consider getting for fun the Kanga.
 
You must be the guru of the family then when it comes to old world Macs. I don’t own any old world Mac, but I may consider getting for fun the Kanga.
The Kanga's an interesting machine. Never used one but I certainly think it'd be fun to :D

It would have to be either my mom or me. She used a Power Macintosh 7100 when it was current and continued using it until around 2001 or 2002, so she also has a lot of experience with Macs of this vintage. :)
 
Just a story but thought this may be interesting

My buddy had a slightly newer PB than yours (3400c I think?) and his battery pack was starting to split open on its own and when I tried to pry it the rest of the way it punctured... I know the smell of punctured battery well, and if you can smell it at all you're already in trouble. I punctured an iPhone battery about half a year ago and it smelled strong too. Aired out quick luckily.
 
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The Kanga's an interesting machine. Never used one but I certainly think it'd be fun to :D

It would have to be either my mom or me. She used a Power Macintosh 7100 when it was current and continued using it until around 2001 or 2002, so she also has a lot of experience with Macs of this vintage. :)
Yeah, I heard it actually is possible to get OS X installed on a Kanga, but I think to find one of those is really rare.. of course in 1997 it was easy to as they were selling them during that time. Vintage Macs are kewl, I admit that - so in 2001, did you play with kid pics software on OS 8.6 or 9 at the time ?

my son loved kid pics in elementary school. Of course, when I was young we had Commodore 64/Ti-994a. :) I still have my TI - talk about vintage dude.
 
Just a story but thought this may be interesting

My buddy had a slightly newer PB than yours (3400c I think?) and his battery pack was starting to split open on its own and when I tried to pry it the rest of the way it punctured... I know the smell of punctured battery well, and if you can smell it at all you're already in trouble. I punctured an iPhone battery about half a year ago and it smelled strong too. Aired out quick luckily.
Battery smell doesn’t smell good, although with my 2011 MacBook Pro the battery started to get bigger, abs it was not used much. Luckily I got rid of the bad battery before it would explode. Thankfully, for my PB G4 titanium I picked up an extra battery someone was selling on eBay in original box for like 20 dollars. It looks as if it was never used.
 
The Kanga's an interesting machine. Never used one but I certainly think it'd be fun to :D

It would have to be either my mom or me. She used a Power Macintosh 7100 when it was current and continued using it until around 2001 or 2002, so she also has a lot of experience with Macs of this vintage. :)
Wow ! behold - a Kanga on eBay

 
Idk, as I have no need for it. And not at 300 dollars. Kanga can’t really do anything, at least the G4 Pismo I have can do things - I may get my G4 Pismo out to try out the sawtooth 8.6 install/Recover CD - so, if I try to put that in will it boot directly into 8.6 ?
 
I feel a sense of ENVY as I lived entirely through the PPC era and feel I should know more than most if not most of you. Though, I never played with anything lower than OS 8.6, how is it that one who was not even in existence when System 7 came out knows more than someone my age - who not lived through it, but experienced it in school ? I find it ironic.. this sort of thing makes me wish I should have paid more attention to technology then. I won’t make the same mistake.

why, for instance would anyone use system 7 over 8.6 or even 9 ? Granted, I never owned a PPC Mac before 2000 due to their pricing at the time, but absolutely ironic that even millennials know more than me ? Really ironic.
 
Alas... the problem is I don’t have any Macs thst natively boot into 7 or it’s derivatives.. sheepshaver maybe, but not the same.
 
Because it's faster. Same goes for OS 6 over 7. These updates all came with cost, and that cost was
Because it's faster. Same goes for OS 6 over 7. These updates all came with cost, and that cost was performance.
Were you around when system 7 came out ? Roger Wilco obviously was not but it’s amazing how I, and most on the forum should already know these things since we experienced it for ourselves in schools when Macs using System 7 was the norm of the day.
 
Just a story but thought this may be interesting

My buddy had a slightly newer PB than yours (3400c I think?) and his battery pack was starting to split open on its own and when I tried to pry it the rest of the way it punctured... I know the smell of punctured battery well, and if you can smell it at all you're already in trouble. I punctured an iPhone battery about half a year ago and it smelled strong too. Aired out quick luckily.
Ow, yeah. Luckily NiCad batteries don't behave like Li-Ion. I've dealt with a few swollen Li-Ion/Li-Po batteries and the utmost priority was to get them disposed of safely.
Yeah, I heard it actually is possible to get OS X installed on a Kanga, but I think to find one of those is really rare.. of course in 1997 it was easy to as they were selling them during that time. Vintage Macs are kewl, I admit that - so in 2001, did you play with kid pics software on OS 8.6 or 9 at the time ?

my son loved kid pics in elementary school. Of course, when I was young we had Commodore 64/Ti-994a. :) I still have my TI - talk about vintage dude.
I have a VIC-20, actually. When I get a chance, I want to get it out again and mess around with it. Haven't had the space or time in a few years to so. :)

I was born in 2002 and actually grew up on Windows for the most part (although Macs were something I was always aware of given my mother), so I never really experienced Mac stuff from the time at the time of release.
 
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Were you around when system 7 came out ? Roger Wilco obviously was not but it’s amazing how I, and most on the forum should already know these things since we experienced it for ourselves in schools when Macs using System 7 was the norm of the day.
The tale end, I used OS 7.6 in school. Funny thing was, the school had gotten a whole set of new Windows 98 machines, which they put everywhere, but still had Macs in computer labs. I had a pc at home, and I just had to play some of the games I found on those systems. Lucky me, older Mac games had no anti-piracy methods. Believe me, it was not easy to emulate that kind of thing before the year 2000.

There is something elegant to the old Mac OS that 9x could never match, and it's something OSX lost in the transition.
 
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You call yourself Europa - are you from Europe originally ? 2002 - that was year when DA Powrmac/QS cane out.. OS 9 was over in 2002, though at the time the web was still the same that 7,8.6, 9 could all browse any page you wanted to. I remember those times very well. I was 23 then
 
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