Allo,

Progress! I picked up another torx set and went about my business. Have you had three pb5XX strung out across your desk before? I have now! Working on the pb550c made me sort of nervous; getting replacement plastics would be next to impossible short of importing another. The 550c is now rocking a 1gb EIDE drive w/ the apple adapter. It's previous drive was in fact a 750mb scsi disk OEM'd by Apple from IBM; it is also equipped with 36mb of ram.

My to-do list for this machine is now quite a bit shorter, sadly not all of it is easy. Still to-do:

1. Get a pcmcia cellular/wifi combo card. (these exist, they were made by t-mobile USA. It would only work with NetBSD, but would make it possible for this machien to be my next take along mac.)

2. Get PCMCIA > cf adapter.

3. Get SCSI > centronics 50 adapter.

4. Take the machine to a nearby hackerspace. I'd like attempt scanning the upper body plastics (mostly the LCD assembly). If I can get high enough resolution scans fabbing a new part might be possible.

Thanks for reading!

//wthww