Good Morning,
On a tip from an eBay user regarding this forum, I come looking for advice, and just registered earlier. After roaming around for awhile, (Wow, impressive!), it looks I've come to the right place. In a way, I hesitate to jump into this sea of desire for a 550c,
but from the posts I've read already, especially re: 500-series PowerBooks, there's some serious knowledge here.Last Fall I lucked into a 550c (the last hole in my end-of-iteration interests) on eBay. It arrived working just fine, in beautiful condition, although only on AC power (original batteries long-dead as expected) and continued to do so for weeks. While doing minor topical dusting & detailing, and with the AC adapter not attached, I removed both batteries from the bays to check for dust, but after replacing them it would not start up from AC power, - voilá!, just like that. I had been through a similar problem (thinking it had been a lost intelligent battery link with the CPU) with a Wallstreet and an original G3 iBook, although those were semi-active machines at the time and certainly a deep-discharge battery state was the likely origin in both) and solved them both by simply replacing the main battery with a new one. At the time that was an easier proposition than these early (first gen?) M1906 intelligent batteries are now, although I've had some batteries rebuilt. Like my PowerBook 170 with it's long-dead internal clock battery but still working like the day it was made, I don't think that the internal clock battery is part of the problem, unlike how it proved to be the solution for the early G3 iMacs. In both cases, a major access hassle. I have not tested the, nor tried another known-working, AC adapter. I did note advice here in the 68k PowerBook area on that likely culprit. Have seen many available, some known working, others untested as always, but have simply not taken the leap to spend the dough to try that route.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
kind regards,