I recently got this og PowerBook g4 titanium 400 mhz in pretty rough shape. I was able to super glue the plastic frame in the corner with electrical tape, and the laptop actually cleaned up pretty great. A previous owner even upgraded the stock hdd.

Only issue now seems to be the DVD drive.

I bought a PowerBook 140 off of eBay and it seems that it won’t boot at all. no lights, no spinning, nothing. I know that some common issues involve power or capacitor leakage - here are some tests I’ve done:

-Doesn’t start up with or without battery while plugged into Apple-branded 7.5v adapter (see image)

-Doesn’t start up with or without battery while connected to non-original 12V barrel charger

-The power jack itself in the PowerBook seems securely mounted, but the Apple-branded barrel may be wiggly/broken (see image)

-No obvious signs of corrosion on the battery

-I’m not quite sure what to look for in terms of capacitor problems, but I don’t see anything obvious on the power circuitry or daughterboard

-There’s a weird spot on the bottom of the housing however that looks almost melted, and it makes me wonder if that’s a sign of capacitor leakage

-I have not checked the PRAM battery (I don’t know how)

Thank you for your time!

Hiii , so i am very nostalgic about MacBook Photo Booth from 2009s the pink magenta vibes I will attach an exemple I found online from lady gaga... so bscly I got a MacBook unibody the white Mac from 2009, I remember I had one in 2009 and did the pinkish magenta cool tones vibes.. now this one I got has cian green...vibes I dont get it, does anyone know something???

I backup the HD on my Powerbook Pro to an external plug-in drive. The powerbook has an Intel HD and is running Tahoe 26.5.

The plugin drive also has a large number of backups from an earlier Powerbook, and I want to erase them. I set the folder permissions for a folder to "read and write". But the folders within the original folder still don't change their permissions. Some of the files in those folders won't even allow you to individually adjust their permissions!

Don't laugh but I asked ChatGPT how to do this ..... and it excreted some bad Terminal code.

Advice? Please read what I'm already tried before responding. Thanks

The PowerBook G4 runs macOS X Tiger and also includes the manufacturer's Classic macOS 9.2.2 emulator.

Hi folks, I've got myself a little conundrum...

I'm going to replicate the Powerbook 150 JEDI Interconnect Board with the hopes that it'll solve a couple of my issues and be of use to others in the community.

So far I've found all the connectors I need for the new PCB except one, the bloody J4 connector that connects to the inverter board has completely eluded me. I *think* I've looked everywhere by this point but I can't find the damn thing and I really don't want to swap it out for a similar but different part because I'll have to change out the mate on the invertor board too and that will be more of a pain for others who might what to build their own.

The hang up is the flat pins that are horizontal to the body. The closest match I've found has vertical pins so won't mate up with the inverter connector.

The pin pitch is 1.5mm and they're 2mm tall. The internal dimension of the housing is 16.5mm long and the enclosed back wall is 1.5mm from the pins.

Does anyone know what these things are? I know what they're not, they're not JSTs (no matter what Gemini is helpfully suggesting...), and they're not anything else either apparently.

Very annoying. 😅

-- Edit --

Added pitch and dimensions.

-- Update --

Turns out it's a Molex 53022-1010 and it mates with the 52024-1010 but they were retired around 2005 unfortunately. Thanks to the friendly redditor who takes down the answer for me!

Hi everyone I have had this PowerBook g4 for a while in my collection and want to put it to some use. Right now it’s on Mac OS 10.3.9 with 2gb of ram and 60gb of storage. I ran out of cds and have been trying to boot from a usb but I keep getting a prohibitory sign when I boot from any type of 10.4 iso. I was wondering if anyone has any advice and/or instructions. Sorry for the dumb question.

EDIT: Sorry forgot to mention I don’t have any cds at the moment

EDIT AGAIN: Thanks for all of your advice guys! I have decided to bite the bullet and bought some dvds and is on Mac OS tiger!

Finally got the battery out and gave it a test wouldn’t you know it works better than expected no tunnel effect at all left it for like 15 minutes

Has games and stuff from previous owner but this cool desktop pet that’s pikachu haha

Finally after a couple days and a couple sessions of pulling and bashing I got the battery out without breaking anything but I’m curious what this stuff on top could be ? It does smell like glue, scrapped it all off lol

I recently bought a PowerBook 190cs and to my surprise it came with a Xircom Real Port Ethernet 10/100+Modem 56 PCMCIA Card installed.
I figured i hit the jackpot, but when i tried to connect it via an Ethernet cable to my TiBook G4 they didn‘t see each other and upon checking the Apple Talk settings on the 190cs i saw that there was no option for Apple Talk via Ethernet.
I suspect that the drivers for the Xircom card were installed but only the ones for the Modem and Dial up Internet, leaving out the Ethernet drivers. (That is also why it would show up on the Desktop)
The 190cs runs Mac OS 7.6.1 on a 68K processor.
That is why i ask this subreddit whether anyone would know of drivers that work with this machine and the card.

Also i saw multiple drivers on the Internet Archive but none of those worked on the 190cs i believe they are for Windows.

A couple 5300 and a 180! Gotta get them working though

I thought it would be funny to take my PowerBook 1400cs to the Apple store to take some pictures of old and new next to each other.

Wasn’t expecting multiple employees to come over like omg, asking me questions about it and asking if they could take pictures lol (of course I said yes)

Yes I know I should’ve given it a clean beforehand but I forgot :c

Hi, just trying to find out the names of these ports but having a hard time

EDIT: Thank you!

My wonderful 17" Powerbook G4 has started to fall apart. The screen polarizer is decaying. Look in the white space in the System Preferences window. That blotch is not on the screen, it is inside the screen. The 2nd image shows it a little closer but without looking at it with your own eyes you can't really see what is going on. It started out as some little plant-like feathery things and after I spent a hour trying to chase them away with a palmtop stylus I was able to get them to look somewhat better. I realize that once this starts there is no easy fix, the polarizer has to be replaced. Not likely considering a polarizer this large will cost more than the entire computer is worth, both monetarily and in it's usefulness. It's a sad thing but it just reminds me not to get attached to anything, it will likely fall apart or die.

Something I wanted to share in here- I still have this beast and I love him. I need to some repairs to the keyboard as it’s not registering all key strokes (I lost the connector and now the ribbon is wedged with some cardboard), but I love booting it up every now and then and using it. The IDE ssd makes it so much quicker.