PowerBook batteries?

[nottorp]

Fun fact; The batteries can also be replaced. You just have to source a suitable replacement and do some soldering. I brought mine back to life at as fraction of the cost of buying a second hand replacement.

I got a full replacement (battery plus some piece of circuit board) off thebookyard.co.uk. But I think they're out of everything PowerPC by now, that was 2-3 years ago.

I could be wrong, since as I mentioned before my PB has some quirky issues with it's lack of ability to charge the main battery, but based on my own experience after replacing the NVRAM battery it only recharged when the Mac was actually running and possibly plugged in.

Ah that would explain it. When i replaced it the first time, I kept the laptop plugged in (with the dead-to-the-point-of-not-being-recognized battery) for like 2 weeks, but i didn't keep it on. Now it was on a lot to cycle the main battery. That may have recharged the PRAM after a while.

Well, I wouldn't go as far as to say that; I have used both Windows machines and Macs for over twenty years. I like having the best of both worlds. But different strokes for different folks I guess, I just dislike the whole Mac V PC thing, since it usually winds up with people suggesting one OS is better than the other for whatever reason and anyone using 'the other' ends up being lambasted for it. Life's too short for such silliness.

I'm more 'unix vs windows'. And Unix wins. OS X is a lot more polished than Linux, but I can live with less polish. I've ran Linux when it came on 80 floppies and you had to recompile your kernel to get drivers, it's a lot easier these days.

As for your graphics corruption... That's bad. You seem to already be aware of the issue but just to say anyway; from experience it's usually not so much a warning sign that something's going wrong but rather a danger sign that something already went wrong and now there's irreparable damage. Of course with the graphics on a PowerBook you're pretty much stuck with replacing the entire logic board as the only fix. If keeping it from getting hot prevent the issue for now though, just stay the course I guess until it potentially one day starts doing it even when cold or completely goes south on you.

What's interesting is that I haven't seen that behaviour until i opened it up and replaced the hdd with a m.2 to sata adapter plus a ssd. I didn't touch the logic board or the cooling system. I might open it again and replace the thermal pads and goo in hope I get it to run cooler.

 

[Xandros]

Yea I've bought things off thebookyard before, and good god do they know how to charge. I tend to import stuff these days though, been using Powerbookmedic recently for example as they have tended to have things in stock thebookyard doesn't/didn't. And yes, a new application of thermal compound might come in handy! Though there's a hell of a lot of it to deal with initially though, or at least on my DSLD there was - they have a heat pipe that runs over the processor and graphics chips and whoever assembled it apparently liked to splurge the thermal paste in there with a firehose apparently. I cleaned it all off and replaced it with more than enough arctic silver cooling paste or, something. I forget exactly what it was called but either way some crap I've used on my self-builds for years. The PB definitely seemed to run cooler after that but the underside still gets hotter than the surface of the sun if I do anything taxing on it. Luckily I don't tend to use it as an actual laptop anymore due to the battery problems so I can still have kids thankfully.

And 80 floppys and kernel recompiles for mere driver installation? You must be some kind of nutter putting up with that. I thought 6 was bad enough for windows 3.1!

Thank the various gods for cd's is all I can say about that. I never bothered with Linux personally, never had a need for it. I only got a taste of Unix in general with 10.4 when I put that on my iMac. I did try and install Yellowdog on the sam iMac prior to that, in an attempt to give it some new life as it was at the time still running 9.2.2. But I couldn't get it to work for reasons that I forget.

Anyway I'm digressing.

 

[nottorp]

Yea I've bought things off thebookyard before, and good god do they know how to charge. I tend to import stuff these days though, been using Powerbookmedic recently for example as they have tended to have things in stock thebookyard doesn't/didn't.

Bookyard doesn't seem to have anything old in stock any more these days. Definitely no batteries, Newertech or otherwise. I only got the lone PRAM battery off them. Come to think of it, i would have got a main battery as well (they did have used originals and new Newertech stuff then) but it was too expensive for my toy budget at the time.

And yes, a new application of thermal compound might come in handy! Though there's a hell of a lot of it to deal with initially though, or at least on my DSLD there was - they have a heat pipe that runs over the processor and graphics chips and whoever assembled it apparently liked to splurge the thermal paste in there with a firehose apparently. I cleaned it all off and replaced it with more than enough arctic silver cooling paste or, something.

I think there are some thermal pads that need replacing too. Random reference: https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/27217/Thermal+Pads+vs+Arctic+Silver
I'll get to it... eventually.

And 80 floppys and kernel recompiles for mere driver installation? You must be some kind of nutter putting up with that. I thought 6 was bad enough for windows 3.1!

Well, cd-roms were still kind of a luxury item back then. So was enough internet to download a cd image, not to mention a cd burner! I did switch to CDs as soon as i could. And now they're dead!

But your average linux distribution meant (and still means) a lot of applications not included with a bare OS from Microsoft. You should count the floppies for windows, the tcp/ip stack (which came separately from the OS back then), the ones for visual c++ or whatever they called it at the time, random utilities, not so much office software but a full scientific text processing package in the form of LaTeX, plus the source code for the whole lot. You could skip a lot of the disks on the initial install, but you made copies of all of them just in case.

Thank the various gods for cd's is all I can say about that. I never bothered with Linux personally, never had a need for it. I only got a taste of Unix in general with 10.4 when I put that on my iMac. I did try and install Yellowdog on the sam iMac prior to that, in an attempt to give it some new life as it was at the time still running 9.2.2. But I couldn't get it to work for reasons that I forget.
Anyway I'm digressing.

Install mac ports or homebrew on your current mac, open a terminal, and you're in BSD. You run a form of BSD under the hood anyway, and it has a ton of command line tools even without macports. No need to install Linux to get your un*x tools, which is why every geek has a macbook these days.

Are we burying the battery info enough?

 

[Xandros]

I don't think I ever used windows 3 for much more than word processing (and in later years playing a Transport tycoon), so I could live with barebones back then. Looks like I was lucky I didn't have an interest in anything software intensive in that case. As for the iMac, I think I'll leave it as is. I only have it as a museum piece these days, or more so for nostalgia of the days I got it. I just use it for emails mostly now. I've instead been looking into getting one of them new fangled rasberry pi things and setting up Linux using one of them though. I want to make a NAS server out of one.

Anyway never mind about burying the battery subject. It's fun to reminisce! I especially like to bring up the late nineties time frame, so I get to say things like how back in "them days" when 56k was cutting edge, a kilobyte was still 1024 bytes, and a megabytes was such a big deal it took an hour and a and half to download. Plus the interweb was only three-quarters full of porn.

 

[nottorp]

I don't think I ever used windows 3 for much more than word processing (and in later years playing a Transport tycoon), so I could live with barebones back then. Looks like I was lucky I didn't have an interest in anything software intensive in that case. As for the iMac, I think I'll leave it as is. I only have it as a museum piece these days, or more so for nostalgia of the days I got it. I just use it for emails mostly now. I've instead been looking into getting one of them new fangled rasberry pi things and setting up Linux using one of them though. I want to make a NAS server out of one.

I happen to do custom arm linux-es for a living, at least some of the time.
If you want a serious NAS, the Pi doesn't have SATA so you'd have to connect the hard drives via USB. You won't get much speed out of it. Other than that, it's a nice board and it has working Linux out of the box plus a large community to help you set it up, so it could be a fun project.

Anyway never mind about burying the battery subject. It's fun to reminisce! I especially like to bring up the late nineties time frame, so I get to say things like how back in "them days" when 56k was cutting edge, a kilobyte was still 1024 bytes, and a megabytes was such a big deal it took an hour and a and half to download. Plus the interweb was only three-quarters full of porn.

56k was with a clean line, for a while i limited my dial-up to 48 or 46k because it was more reliable