Congrats, and a few random thoughts from a fellow Duo fan (working 270c and 2300c; "resting for now" 280c; plus two DuoDocks with replacement lids; plus a separate external battery recharger/conditioner and goodness knows how many parts in bags and boxes). I really bit the Duo bait when it arrived, and was fiddling with my 270c just yesterday.
My Duos will not boot with a bad (dead or shorted) main battery. Take the main battery out and give the 2300c a whirl. You might get lucky.
Duos seem also to be commonly afflicted by GLOD and associated power management issues, though it is by no means as serious a problem in the Duo series as it is in a 2400c (fortunately!). So the power manager may be the source of the trouble, and a working backup battery may well be needed. An advantage in the present instance is that the 2300c is NOT a 2400c, and so if the electronics are viable, you should be able to get it to boot, even if somewhat unreliably.
There are also, as I recall, three or four capacitors (near the power connector) that are not visible until the machine is disassembled that may need to be looked at. Those in my machines seem fine, but as electrolytic capacitor failure is a typical issue in vintage hardware, you ought to know the score. Take special care when disassembling the 2300c, however, as the trackpad cable is easily broken and as it is very hard to find a replacement part. It happens just when you begin to separate the two halves. The cable is unique to the 2300c.
Fortunately, I have managed to scrounge two working backup batteries from parts machines, and the stability of the two Duos that I have running is now excellent. I did need to replace a transformer in my 2300c, a part which I took from a dead 280c logic board; the 2300c also runs from a CF drive, in absolute silence and at a very usable speed (and under MacOS 8.6 at that). I have also successfully re-packed a Type 3 battery with replacement cells, and have a still-working battery from the mid-90s. It is impossible to repack one of these without physically matching the cells, though, as the space is very crowded in a Duo battery.
One of the great things about the Duos is their memory capacity. I think I have 32MB in the 270c and a whopping 56MB, I seem to remember, in the 2300c. So they were limited machines in not having a floppy etc., and yet they were not limited machines in other respects; one way of looking at them is to say that Duos were really designed for use in combination with the DuoDock and so as a sort of "portable desktop" for professional users; hence they were made to accept a good complement of memory. The advertising made clear that this was the intended market, so while you can read on LEM and such about how the Duo was a cut down machine and so forth, in fact it was not. It was a fully functional, expandable desktop in essence, out of which you could take the guts and put it in a briefcase to take home at night. It also wasn't a particular pain to do so, because of the tiny size of the machine; a Duo is about the same size as a 12" PowerBook G4. That was the genius of it, and that is why the DuoDock was marketed with the machine. Those little external floppy drive add-ons and such weren't the real deal, but merely the poor cousins.
I can get around 3 hrs with the repacked battery in the 270c or around 1hr 50mins from the same battery in the 2300c. The 603e @ 100MHz really drinks down the juice; the 68030 is, by contrast, very efficient. The 1990s battery was dead when it came to me, but the usual cycling technique revived it to the extent that it will give me 1hr & 50 mins or so in the 270c (and a little over an hour in the 2300c). You could likely do better - I'd bet 4 hrs or more - with fresh cells in the 230, because of the lower power requirements of the passive-matrix screen. Even with those results, however, I doubt that the real capacity of new cells can be reached, as I don't think that the machine knows quite how to fully charge new, replacement cells (2000ma NiMh cells, e.g., being way beyond the capacities of cells in 1993-5).
So I have invested lots of time in my Duos and really like them. Be sure to check out the Duo commercials from the early 90s on YouTube/Vectronics etc.
And persist with the keyboards. They seem to improve with use. Just don't expect a miracle; "improvement" is a relative term.
My Duos will not boot with a bad (dead or shorted) main battery. Take the main battery out and give the 2300c a whirl. You might get lucky.
Duos seem also to be commonly afflicted by GLOD and associated power management issues, though it is by no means as serious a problem in the Duo series as it is in a 2400c (fortunately!). So the power manager may be the source of the trouble, and a working backup battery may well be needed. An advantage in the present instance is that the 2300c is NOT a 2400c, and so if the electronics are viable, you should be able to get it to boot, even if somewhat unreliably.
There are also, as I recall, three or four capacitors (near the power connector) that are not visible until the machine is disassembled that may need to be looked at. Those in my machines seem fine, but as electrolytic capacitor failure is a typical issue in vintage hardware, you ought to know the score. Take special care when disassembling the 2300c, however, as the trackpad cable is easily broken and as it is very hard to find a replacement part. It happens just when you begin to separate the two halves. The cable is unique to the 2300c.
Fortunately, I have managed to scrounge two working backup batteries from parts machines, and the stability of the two Duos that I have running is now excellent. I did need to replace a transformer in my 2300c, a part which I took from a dead 280c logic board; the 2300c also runs from a CF drive, in absolute silence and at a very usable speed (and under MacOS 8.6 at that). I have also successfully re-packed a Type 3 battery with replacement cells, and have a still-working battery from the mid-90s. It is impossible to repack one of these without physically matching the cells, though, as the space is very crowded in a Duo battery.
One of the great things about the Duos is their memory capacity. I think I have 32MB in the 270c and a whopping 56MB, I seem to remember, in the 2300c. So they were limited machines in not having a floppy etc., and yet they were not limited machines in other respects; one way of looking at them is to say that Duos were really designed for use in combination with the DuoDock and so as a sort of "portable desktop" for professional users; hence they were made to accept a good complement of memory. The advertising made clear that this was the intended market, so while you can read on LEM and such about how the Duo was a cut down machine and so forth, in fact it was not. It was a fully functional, expandable desktop in essence, out of which you could take the guts and put it in a briefcase to take home at night. It also wasn't a particular pain to do so, because of the tiny size of the machine; a Duo is about the same size as a 12" PowerBook G4. That was the genius of it, and that is why the DuoDock was marketed with the machine. Those little external floppy drive add-ons and such weren't the real deal, but merely the poor cousins.
I can get around 3 hrs with the repacked battery in the 270c or around 1hr 50mins from the same battery in the 2300c. The 603e @ 100MHz really drinks down the juice; the 68030 is, by contrast, very efficient. The 1990s battery was dead when it came to me, but the usual cycling technique revived it to the extent that it will give me 1hr & 50 mins or so in the 270c (and a little over an hour in the 2300c). You could likely do better - I'd bet 4 hrs or more - with fresh cells in the 230, because of the lower power requirements of the passive-matrix screen. Even with those results, however, I doubt that the real capacity of new cells can be reached, as I don't think that the machine knows quite how to fully charge new, replacement cells (2000ma NiMh cells, e.g., being way beyond the capacities of cells in 1993-5).
So I have invested lots of time in my Duos and really like them. Be sure to check out the Duo commercials from the early 90s on YouTube/Vectronics etc.
And persist with the keyboards. They seem to improve with use. Just don't expect a miracle; "improvement" is a relative term.