Chemical Shift

I was able to get the PowerBook 5300cs working recently. I bought it at the Surplus Sales store at school for $15 about a month or two ago. It was just the notebook, so it didn’t come with an AC adapter which means I wasn’t sure if it really worked.

I was able to order an AC adapter from Shreve Systems for $2 and an VST battery charger for $5. Most other places I’ve seen these for sale wanted a lot more. I also ordered a Focus MV16-EN external video & ethernet card for just under $14 including shipping from Data Memory Systems.

When my orders arrived, I powered up the notebook and found that it was in good working order. It had 32MB of RAM, 16MB on the mainboard and a 16MB expansion card. The hard drive was 750MB, half-full with plenty of useful programs. Lucky for me, but people should really wipe their hard drives before getting rid of their computers. A simple reformat should be done, at the very least.

I swapped in the 20GB hard drive I had bought for my i-Opener a few years back. I had to format the hard drive the the Beige G3 266 DT, and copy over the install files for Mac OS 8.1. I made three partitions on the drive: 2GB for Mac OS 8.1; 2GB for Mac OS 9.1; and ~15GB for Data. The mounting holes didn’t line up properly in the drive holder, so I placed some foam pads over the hard drive and used electrical tape to hold it all in place. I also installed the external video/ethernet card and removed the standard external video card.

Everything is now working fine, though it is no speed demon by today’s standards. It’s still a good machine for running a word processor and some older programs. I think its a pretty good machine, especially for the amount of money I’ve invested in it.

Now, I would like to get an AC adapter, a new keyboard, and few other things to get the Thinkpad 560 I bought for Melissa up and running. It too cost just $15 for the computer itself.