Friday, April 15, 2011

Macintosh Classic II

I got a hair up my butt and I decided to get a vintage Mac. It's so far the best $10, 19-year-old paper weight I've ever bought!

It didn't come with a keyboard and mouse, but I hope to borrow an old set on Monday to kick the tires on this beast some more. They don't make clickity-clacking hard disk drives like they use too. No sir.

Now, it didn't turn right on without some coaxing. The motherboard had some leaking capacitors and gave the screen some gobbly-gook image. The problem is quite common from leaking batteries or capacitors on the motherboard.

I pulled out the board and saw the culprit - leaking capacitors. I read that cleaning the motherboard with some isopropyl alcohol will generally get it back up and running, but you should really replace all the capacitors with tantalum capacitor to permanently fix the issue. I'll see how far my cleaning gets me. After all, I'm not sure how far my puppy love will last for this archaic pile.

References:

http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2009-04-13-mac-classic-2-dishwasher-fix.htm
http://68kmla.org/wiki/Capacitor_Replacement#Macintosh_Classic_II.2C_Performa_200



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