Repairing a Apple PowerBook 150 With Serious Issues

Sometimes you purchase an old device that is very cheap for a good reason. So too with the 1995 Apple PowerBook 150 that [Hugh Jeffreys] purchased for a single Aussie buck back in 2018. After finally taking it off the shelf recently, the issues are very apparent. Without even trying to turn it on, the visible damage ranges from the display that’s gone full vinegar with wolverine scratches, to the snapped hinge. Naturally the HDD also turned out to be dead.

Without a functioning display there was little point in continuing, so the disassembly started there, revealing many broken plastic clips. The cause of the vinegar symptom is the degrading polarizer, which with some finesse can be removed like a thick screen protector. Fortunately, here it’s put on top of the glass layer of the display, so after peeling it off the remaining glue can be safely dissolved and scraped away.

Inside the case the RTC battery was found to have started leaking, causing corrosion and damaging a variety of important traces for the keyboard and display. All of this damage seemed fixable, but after a while the damage was just too severe. Fortunately he was able to obtain a replacement for the affected daughter PCB, which allowed the display to come back to life, so that a new polarizer could be installed after cutting a large sheet down to size.

A replacement hinge was then printed in PETG and glued to the part of the lid where it had broken off, while snapped plastic clips were reinforced with glue where they had hung on. Finally, the IDE HDD was replaced with a CF card via an IDE adapter and the entire system reassembled.

Unfortunately [Hugh] wasn’t able to immediately source or create MacOS floppies with a version that the laptop wanted to install from, so that part couldn’t be tested yet, but there’s a good chance that this old PowerBook 150 has finally been cured of at least its biggest ills, without spending much more than the original asking price.