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| Free Powerbook 5300ce, magazines, and more | |
| Posted by: Dog Cow on 2010-05-18 11:08:49 I was given yesterday evening a PowerBook 5300ce, a box of Mac magazines, Civ II, SimCity 2000, and 3 unopened PhoneNet boxes. The 5300ce is a real gem. I checked the packing list and it appears that I have everything which is listed there, right down to registration card, eWorld flyer, and battery cover. This 5300ce is a monster and I can tell that it was the top-of-the-line PowerBook of its day! 8-o I booted it with the included Disk Tools disk (yes, even that was on the packing list and included) and revealed that it has the maximum 64 MB of RAM. Combine that with the 117 MHz clock speed, ability to run OS 9, and I might just get a wireless PCMCIA card to use this as a portable Mac around town. It also has a 3rd-party video/ethernet card in it, so I can hook up an external monitor, and do Ethernet! Very nice. The original Apple card was in the static bag, and I've got the box and docs for this newer card too. Anyway, two downsides: 1.) The HD is gone. I opened the PowerBook to reveal this, as I was wondering why it wasn't showing up. 2.) The battery is, quite understandably, dead. There's even some corrosion on the connectors. I checked MacTracker and it revealed that the 5300ce not only cost $6,800 when new, but also had an ATA bus. I was wondering if this is true. If so, it should make it easier to get an HD for this laptop. The technical booklet included with the 5300ce declined to note the HD bus, giving only its size, 2.5", and a list of configurations (up to 1.1 GB, which is what I assume originally came in this PowerBook). Second thing most interesting was the stack of magazines. These are mostly MacAddicts from 1998-2002, and there's also some MacFormats, Macworlds, a MacHome, and a few Linux magazines. Also of interest is that the CDs were saved, so I have just about every CD which came with these magazines. Very nice! 🙂 | |
| Posted by: slomacuser on 2010-05-18 11:58:28 I have a original Apple (IBM) 750 MB HDD from 5300cs, also a floppy drive and some parts as the display was dead, I disassambled the unit and have parts for sale/trade, if you are interested, also a nice bag   | |
| Posted by: Dog Cow on 2010-05-18 12:11:27 Thanks. I think that I'll just buy a new hard drive to put in it, but I am still going to need a battery. | |
| Posted by: LCGuy on 2010-05-18 13:52:52 Nice score, especially for free. For the record, I can confirm that YES, all PowerBook 5300s have an ATA hard drive, as do all PowerPC PowerBooks (apart from PPC upgraded PB5xx systems and some Duo 2300s that have SCSI HDDs). | |
| Posted by: Dog Cow on 2010-05-18 13:59:23 Any suggestions on what to do about the battery? I went to the campus computer shop an hour ago and asked about wifi PCMCIA cards. But then I got distracted by the b&w G3, PowerMac 5300, and Color Stylewriter 1500 which were brought in, so I'll be back next week to see if I want to soup up this PowerBook, or get a b&w G3 instead. Oh, how the G3 calls me! :O (this is the same shop from the $50 orange iMac incident-- and yes, that orange iMac was still there when I went in today) | |
| Posted by: Anonymous Freak on 2010-05-18 16:22:35 You can either rebuild it yourself, or send it to somewhere like http://batteryrebuild.com/ (I used them to rebuild two 500-series batteries; it took them a couple months, but they work great -- 8 hours on a pair!) | |
Posted by: Dog Cow on 2010-05-18 16:24:04You can either rebuild it yourself,I'm interested; tell me more. | |
| Posted by: Osgeld on 2010-05-18 16:45:49 crack the case open, you will see a bunch of cells soldered together, replace reseal Its a pretty easy practice, you just have to make sure you get the right kind of batteries and that they can provide enough (or more) amperage and physically they are often the size of AA batteries in these bricks, maybe C sized or D sized in the tube style batteries Here is Kip Kay on the subject, course this guy can make the flux capacitor seem stupid simple http://kipkay.com/videos/battery-hacks/laptop-battery-hack | |
| Posted by: Dog Cow on 2010-05-18 23:04:41 I was looking into PCMCIA hard drives just a few minutes ago, and I was wondering if the PowerBook 5300ce can boot off of one. | |
| Posted by: glf on 2010-07-07 22:45:19 Yes, I'm rather sure it can. I have a few spare orinoco wifi cards if you are looking for one. | |
| Posted by: Anonymous Freak on 2010-07-08 00:48:56 I have successfully booted a 5300ce off both an old ATA Flash PCMCIA card and a PC Card-to-Memory Stick adapter. The CE, running 8.1, was an incredible machine. Up until the day it took a tumble off my desk, and now the screen is broken. xx( (Doesn't look broken, but the top 1/3 doesn't refresh unless I apply an unhealthy amount of torque, then it only refreshes while I'm holding it that way. The bottom 2/3 slowly fades to white over the course of half an hour or so unless I apply pressure in a certain location.) | |
| Posted by: Dog Cow on 2010-07-08 09:00:59 Thanks for the info. I took a look at eBay prices for PCMCIA flash drives and I didn't like them. :-/ | |
| Posted by: glf on 2010-07-09 13:59:06 Just for the sake of information, the IDE drives that came with the 5300's were the, 17mm "fatter" 2.5"ers. You can easily stick in a larger capacity 15mm with a bit' o' foam, etc.- that won't cause heat issues, under it, and it works very well. It also seemed that Apple did their best to use the slowest benchmark drives they could in Powerbooks.. why was that?? I couldn't stand the 750mb IBM donkey-cart that my 5300c originally had.. | |
Posted by: Bunsen on 2010-07-10 08:30:07I took a look at eBay prices for PCMCIA flash drives and I didn't like them. :-/A PCMCIA* to CF adapter and a CF card will be a looooooot cheaper. That or a 2.5" IDE/ATA to CF adapter for the internal drive bay. *NB: not Cardbus. PCMCIA aka PC Card only. | |
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