How Do You Turn On A Mac Portable?

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How Do You Turn On A Mac Portable?

This wuestion is just as the title says. How do you start a mac portable? I googled it, and I'm still confused. Please help me. Thanks

G4from128k's picture
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Do you have a battery? AFAIK

Do you have a battery? AFAIK, a Mac Portable needs a battery to start - the AC is too wimpy to handle the power surge at start-up (or something like that).

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Yeah

I saw an ebay auction and I just wanted to know. It said it had a battery and a 9v backup battery. Thanks.

jt
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Just like a PB100 . . .

. . . hit any key and it SHOULD start up, but don't hold your breath! Most of the main batteries are dead as a doornail. The 9v battery is for RAM Disk Backup, just like the three pancake batteries in the PB100. Nab the user manual for the PB100, it's basically a Portable Redux from the wizards at Sony.

If your battery is too dead to boot your Portable with the stock AC Adapter, TRY one from a 100 series PB, they're more powerful than the Portable's. The AC adapter for my PB100 used to boot and run my Portable reliably, HDD and all. It has become finicky lately, probably because the 100 series PSUs are marginal for running a battery-free Portable sans HDD. That info's from tomlee59, so you can take it to the bank.

jt

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The Battery is the key...

I recently found a Mac Portable on eBay myself, and I researched this topic very carefully before purchasing it. It turns out that AC adapter serves no other purpose than to charge the battery. This is probably why yours is going "finicky", jt. No matter the power of your AC adapter, if your battery is truly dead, it won't turn on. There are a few solutions, though.

1) Hook a 6 or 6.5v AC adapter directly to the battery terminals. This would be fine if you never wanted to run the MacP away from an outlet, but let's assume you do want to.

2) Get a new Li-Ion battery from www.batteryspace.com or some other favorite battery place. I used their universal Li-Ion battery (3V~12V, approx 36 W @ max 2A draw) as a replacement. Drawback: the Power Manager won't function properly, and you can't recharge by plugging in the charger. So:

3) Pop open the original battery case, remove the innards, and replace them with a new 6V SLA (sealed Lead-Acid) battery from someplace like Radio $hack. I've seen at least one mod on the web that worked like this, and the MacP will see it as an original battery.

My MacP has some serious Sad Mac issues, so I've ripped out the guts and I'm replacing them with a Beige G3 D/T, 10'4" color LCD, and laptop drives (assuming I can get OS 9 to recognize them). So far so good, it's down to just some Dremel work at this point ^_^

-Martin

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oooooooooo0oooo

A 10' 4" screen? woooooowwwwww..... my bedroom walls aren't even that tall.

Wink

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Well, the portable _is_ a monster... ;D

Silly finger, what did you do?! That is, of course, 10.4" Blum 3

Actually, I'm thankful that this thing is so huge inside. It looks like I'll be able to fit everything in without adjusting anything besides the port area; with the PW-120 mini-itx power supply and an ATX extension cable, I should be able to fit the original G3 floppy in front of the right place, too!

-Martin

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