I left the house to pick up a Powerbook G4 off Craigslist and stumbled onto a treasure trove of old stuff from a friend's garage. The headliner is a Lisa with a Profile drive:

We couldn't find the top case for the Profile drive nor the cable and controller card, yet. The Lisa mouse was also missing but it may turn up as he digs further. Hell yeah!

Then he started springing other things on me. First, a cute little OLPC:


There is a spot of damage to the screen and one key had been torn off from use. So cute.

Next he dug out a Compaq Portable and a Compaq Portable III


There was also a mysterious Macintosh motherboard with no signs of the rest of the Mac. I looked it up and it's a IIci board. The battery had exploded but had already been removed. I have no 68k Macs to borrow parts from so I can't test it. I cleaned off the battery guts and I'll give a quick wipe down and put it up for sale.

I've only powered up the OLPC. I'm looking for warning what to check before firing up the older machines and to do some more looking around myself for any obvious problem and unexploded batteries or RIFAs. So what are the most common failures on these beasts?

>> JDW said:

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that is odd.