Hello again beachycove,

Thanks for this great advice, it all makes very good sense, and deserves an investigation so I will check it out. I haven't ever owned any of the other 500-series,- only seen friend's machines falling apart mostly from the plastics maladies described in other posts here, so this aspect is new to me. I'm sure there must be a great reason to have made a more complicated power connector on these, - compared, say, to the simplicity of the early 100-series. Although that begs the question as to why did they ever switch from metal catches on the screen lids to plastic ones as on the 3400c. Stooopid.

And greetings JB,

I appreciate your advice too. For me, unlike a lot of you (someone's posted photo of their very active workbench comes to mind, been trying to find it again in the posts... ) I am not a skilled tinkerer/technician in this early era of Mac laptops. I am an electrical technician in other disciplines and mechanically inclined, and so was brave (and successful) enough to crack open my 3400c to swap the RAM in order to max it out to 144mb, - and that seemed risky enough for me. With an otherwise intact 550c, your suggestion would be (to me) like scraping some gold off the holy grail just to see if it's plated or solid. I've had a lot of desktop Macs open for a wide variety of reasons and never screwed anything up, but until the G3 PowerBooks came out (I have a Pismo) with their easy access, the whole scenario of dealing with delicate electronics in very cramped spaces was too daunting, and this is not the machine for me to practice on. As for photos, I do have some and be glad to; what's the right procedure for posting them on this forum? Suggested size limit etc...

Thanks!