As I mentioned in my ice storm entry, my Powerbook 520c died and I figured out the problem with the Powerbook 5300c adapter. I went to Radio Shack and bought a pack of butt connectors (despite what it sounds like they are plastic-coated metal tubes that you crimp on to wires) and was able to connect the wires to a standard power adapter tip that came with my Recoton Universal Car Adapter power supply. It is surprising that Apple would settle for a standard power adapter tip for one of their pieces of hardware. I got the adapter crimped on, tested the polarity twice, and hooked it up. The laptop, which probably hasn’t started in five years or more, made some awful beeping noises, and started right up. And the clock was only a little over a year off, stating that it was 1/1/04.
It seems to work okay. I have everything from my old Mac backed up on zip disks and the zip drive seems to work fine with the 5300c. Now what I want to do is take all my archives of files, most of which are in ClarisWorks and put bring them over to ClarisWorks on the PC. Then I can convert them to Word or Excel or whatever. I never did get around to doing that with the 520.
The only thing missing from it is the 520 had an internal modem. The 5300 doesn’t. Instead it has PC card slots, but I don’t have a PC Card modem. I wonder if Jeb has an old one lying around?
I once had a PC Card w/ an “X-Jack” that may work, assuming the PC Card slot is standard and you can find the drivers. I’ll go digging for it and let you know.
My clock radio went off with the loud beeping noise instead of the soft music. I realized that I had some how switched the button to alarm. Huh.
re: “stating that it was 1/1/04” In the event this was not tongue-in-cheek… That is 1/1/1904, one of the default start dates for Macs with a dead clock battery. Scroll down to bottom of this page to find “Related Trivia.”