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| PowerBook 190cs: How Hard To Get A Battery? |
Posted by: EvieSigma on 2016-09-06 20:58:10
I just found this baby on the bay of E, missing a battery, but otherwise looking pretty good for a 20 year old laptop.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Apple-Macintosh-PowerBook-190-Series-Laptop-M3047-AS-IS-FOR-PARTS-/182263316385?hash=item2a6fbd7fa1:g:evwAAOSwdzVXsJ~w
My question is, how difficult and expensive is it to get a battery? And is the battery what fits in that huge hole or is this thing severely damaged?
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Posted by: Elfen on 2016-09-06 21:21:51
Battery is next to impossible to get. And it is best to get the Nickel Cadium or Nickel Metal Hydride battery than the Lithium Ion battery.
And they would be in poor/dead condition. At least with the Nickel Cadium, you night be able to replace the cells in the pack, but not with the other two.
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Posted by: Anonymous Freak on 2016-09-06 22:49:56
You can replace the cells in NiMH batteries just fine - there are NiMH AA cells available.
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Posted by: John_A on 2016-09-06 23:18:41
Remember rebuilding one of those a couple of years back. Its basically lots of AA size batteries with soldertags connected in series inside, (12 1,2v I think)
Tricky part is to open the plastic without ruining it. Maybe cutting with a dremel would be the best option? (I didnt ????)
There is also a protection diode (thermistor) inside that easily gets damaged when you open the case. (Yes, I know this too ????).
Rebuilding NiMh batteries are done all the time by people using powertools.
http://www.steveduncan.net/html/reparing_a_pack.html
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Posted by: just.in.time on 2016-09-07 00:31:24
Best bet would be to find a parts machine. 190 series and I believe 5300 series all share the same battery... So 190, 190cs, 5300, 5300cs, 5300c, and 5300ce. I owned a 5300cs over a decade ago and I want to say it was a NiMH battery. Should be rebuildable like the other posters have said.
As an aside, the 3400c and 3500/Kanga PowerBook G3 use a battery that is physically the same size, however it is Lithium Ion. Those two models (3400/G3) can use your older battery, but you can not use theirs. Your laptop will refuse to charge the Lithium pack. That, and rebuilding a NiCd/NiMH pack is much easier to do.
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Posted by: Anonymous Freak on 2016-09-07 00:49:16
Apparently the *VERY* earliest 5300s released could use the Lithium Ion batteries, as the 5300 series was supposed to ship with LiIon batteries that were recalled due to fire risk just as they were hitting stores. The later 5300s had a firmware limitation that would prevent them from working with LiIons. If you happen to have one of these ultra-early ones, it will work with a 3400/Kanga LiIon battery. (I used to have one, but it died. None of my remaining 5300s work with the LiIon battery.)
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Posted by: EvieSigma on 2016-09-07 05:45:09
Well, aside from the missing battery, would this be a decent purchase or should I run far away?
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Posted by: just.in.time on 2016-09-07 08:02:57
Since they didn't show it turned on, but it included the power adapter I'd say it's safe to say something is wrong. I'd go out on a ledge and say that the power jack needs to be resoldered to the DC board/logic board. It's a fairly straight forward and easy fix (two rather large solder points, hardest part is the prep to get there). The 190/5300 series were known to have fragile power jacks. At least mine did.
All that said, it's still a 68LC040 processor. The one thing it has going for it over the 5xx series is that it has built in PCMCIA, no rare card cage required. I recall being able to boot mine from a pcmcia to SD adapter, makes it easy to work around a dead hard drive. For the price it's at now, it would make for a fun and hopefully easy restore project 🙂
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Posted by: John_A on 2016-09-07 08:03:54
The screen is not great by any standards, 8-bit color passive. Dont expect all keys on the keyboard to be working either. Ram expansion is a quite rare card that slots in under the keyboard.
The good parts is that it works well with some of the wifi pc-cards, and has a ide HD. Thought of getting a industrial disk-on-module ide drive and try in it, but unfortunately I never did.
Otherwise this is about as quick a 68k mac gets without paying a fortune.
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Posted by: EvieSigma on 2016-09-07 09:07:05
I think I'll pass on this one, but I would like one of the old slate gray PowerBooks.
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