Fixing a 30-Year-Old Laptop with Modern Components

While working on a 30-year-old laptop, we encountered a series of challenges that led to an unexpected upgrade. The original scuzzy hard drive had failed and was difficult to find replacements for. To overcome this issue, we decided to upgrade the laptop's storage system using a Raspberry Pi-based system called Blue scuzzy V2. This new system emulates a scuzzy hard drive and connects with the same pins as the original but uses a Micro SD card instead of a traditional hard disk.

The process began with removing the broken standoffs that were causing issues with the laptop's internal components. These standoffs were held together with wood, which was not sufficient to support the weight of the laptop's parts. We replaced them with brass screw threads that were 3D printed to fit perfectly into our new holes. This ensured a secure and stable assembly.

As we continued to work on the laptop, we also decided to harvest the keyboard from another donor machine. The original keyboard was yellowed and had poor wear, making it difficult to use. We replaced it with a better one from another donor machine that seemed less degraded. This upgrade made sense considering the cost and availability of replacement parts for the original laptop.

The repair process took an unexpected turn as we discovered that every single standoff in our case was covered in cracks. These standoffs were prone to failure, and we needed to reinforce them to avoid any further issues. We applied JB Weld to the affected areas, ensuring a strong bond and preventing any more cracks from forming. This process was crucial in maintaining the laptop's stability and preventing any potential failures.

With the repairs underway, we began to discuss another upgrade that we could implement. The original laptop used scuzzy hard drives in the early 90s, which were high-end at the time but now difficult to find replacements for. Our machine did have a working scuzzy drive, but it was not the original one. We saw an opportunity to upgrade and replace it with a new system that would provide faster performance and more reliability.

The Blue scuzzy V2 system was chosen for its compatibility with our existing hardware and ability to emulate a scuzzy hard drive using a Micro SD card. This solution allowed us to maintain the laptop's original appearance while upgrading its storage capabilities. We were excited about this opportunity to upgrade the laptop and improve its performance.

With the new system installed, we began to reassemble the laptop. The first step was to attach the brass screw threads to our 3D printed holes. We used a hot soldering iron to melt the threads into place, ensuring a secure fit. This process was fascinating to watch and completed with ease.

Now that everything is repaired, our 30-year-old laptop is running smoothly. The new Blue scuzzy V2 system has improved its performance and reliability. One of the most significant benefits is its complete silence. There are no moving parts inside the machine except for the floppy disk drive, which only activates when a floppy disk is inserted.

We were also eager to test the floppy disk drive to see if it worked properly after our repairs. We swapped out the original unit and powered on the laptop. The new drive snapped into place, and we heard it working. When we opened up the desktop folder, we found that we had 440 megabytes available storage space. This was a testament to the success of our repair process.

A huge shoutout goes to Steve from Mac 84 who helped us image the hard drive and put it on the Micro SD card. The system works amazingly well and runs exactly as it did before, but without the risk of the original hard drive failing. We were thrilled with the outcome of this project and grateful for the opportunity to upgrade our 30-year-old laptop.

Looking forward, we believe that if there's one more thing that could be done on this machine, it would be replacing some of the caps in the display. We have a couple of vertical horizontal lines present, which often indicate that the caps might need cleaning or replacement. Apart from this minor adjustment, our 30-year-old laptop is now fully functional and should last for years to come.

Finally, we want to thank everyone who has been following our repair process. If you'd like to see more projects like this in the future, consider subscribing to the Luciano YouTube channel. We appreciate your support and look forward to working on more exciting projects with you.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enguys I really I really need to be banned from eBay because I keep going on there and buying some cool stuff today I bought this it's the Macintosh PowerBook 180c and it is arguably the first color laptop that Apple ever made it came out in June of 1993 and it boasts an 8.4 inch active Matrix display now the big crucial thing there is active Matrix because technically this is not the first color power book that Crown would go to the Macintosh PowerBook 165c which came out the previous October but most people agree that that thing was kind of smelly and not very good and the the screen looked pretty bad and it was also slightly lower resolution so it wasn't a great success this on the other hand is the first time Apple put a colored display in a power book and it was good and so I bought one um but it it's uh it needs some work oh that sound it's so great you gonna work oh you hear that there goes that old hard drive I'm not sure if it's original but surprisingly it boots except there are one or two issues so the first of those issues is the trackball it has no issue going left and right but uh we don't have up and down so you're basically stuck clicking on the top menu and and that's about it fortunately I have an external mouse that we can connect all right we are all set now we can move around and we can actually find out more about this Mac so this is running Apple system software 7.5.5 and you can see we have a whopping 14 megabytes of ram if we turn the machine around you might be able to see that the Gap in the screen up here is slightly smaller than down here and while the screen is definitely a little loose you can see this bottom part flexing yeah I'm pretty sure that the hinges are a little bit shot there's also something um loose in here yeah you hear that however the biggest issue is the floppy drive because when we go ahead and insert a disk like that after a few seconds this error message shows up the disk is unreadable by this Macintosh so I think we've got a pretty good list here of problems to address on this laptop to get it back to full working order so let's start by tearing this thing open a little bit because I want to see what's going on in there but first today's video is sponsored by delete me back when this PowerBook 180c was new in 1993 there weren't too many concerns about data privacy but now things have definitely changed delete me is a privacy service for reducing unwanted personal information exposure on the public web delete me has removed more than 35 million pieces of data for their customers with each person averaging over 2 000 pieces that can be found over an average two-year membership duration after signing up all you have to do is submit some basic personal information the you won't delete me to find and in just seven days you'll get a report with all the data they found and will remove from data Brokers data Brokers such as these whole wow oh God that's a really long list it's no wonder why I and other YouTubers that I know have used delete me to get some of our information off the internet so take back control of your online data today use my code and the link in the description down below to get a whopping 20 off a full year subscription big thanks to delete me for sponsoring this video and now let's get back to it lift up Up and Away there we go we've got two halves of a power book take a look at our modem Port down here it's an atnt branded sub board that just sits on top of the logic board and it says replacement so maybe this was upgraded after the fact let's go ahead and pull out the trackball because I want to see if we can get this cleaned out and working now this is going to be hard for you guys to see but there are two little wheels one here and one here and that is our two directions right so the trackball moves around and it and it turns these little rollers in here you can see these little blue rollers and you can see for left and right the wheel is spinning now for up and down it is also spinning now you're really not going to be able to see this but I did just notice that this little tab right in front of the wheel was just slightly bent now as it happens that little tab is integral to the trackball it's the LED that it uses to determine the movement when you move the trackball that little blue roller turns a wheel that has spokes in it on the other side of it is an IR sensor and it's able to read the interval at which that wheel is spinning blocking the light from the LED and that tells the computer how fast and where to move the mouse okay we're now booted let's see oh my gosh guys it that fixed it with one small victory under my belt I opened up the machine again this time to go after the display there's just a couple of screws holding this thing together and the display panel comes right out of the back housing and sure enough the screw posts are absolutely annihilated this is an Infamous issue on these power books so I started clipping away at the plastic and eventually had to whip out the grinder so I could saw through this mess and after honestly over an hour I was able to get it sanded down enough to where I could use these 3D printed hinge Replacements which I'll link down below so I whipped out the JB Weld because we don't want these things going anywhere it is completely baffling to me why Apple decided that the only reinforcement these hinges needed were some small brass threads pressed into very flimsy plastic but we're not going to make the same mistake so while those hinges are curing let's go ahead and pull out our deceased floppy drive now as I was pulling this out I discovered yet more destroyed screw mounts this really does seem to be a thread on this machine pun intended and for what it's worth the floppy Drive looks pretty nasty as well gosh well there's a lot more to this project than originally met the eye obviously we've got the screen hinges which completely fell apart even in here the floppy Drive standoffs have fallen apart on the bottom casing and there's a couple of minor things like the keyboard is fairly yellowed so we need a number of replacement parts and this being a 30 year old laptop they're not exactly plentiful so I got the next best thing another laptop that's right this is a PowerBook 145b so it's not the same exact model but this cost me forty dollars and it doesn't work however a lot of the parts are interchangeable obviously the screen and the bezel the whole top case really is different but we don't really need that the keyboard should be the same and crucially that floppy Drive should be the same now we don't know if this one's going to work it's a bit of a gamble but for 40 bucks with a bunch of parts to choose from I'm gonna take that gamble taking apart our donor machine I found yeah you guessed it yet more completely annihilated plastic standoffs this floppy Drive isn't really being held down either so let's go ahead and remove it when I took the bracket off I did notice something interesting this also seems to be a replaced hard drive and it's being held in with like wood anyway let's pull that drive out at this point I also figured I might as well go ahead and harvest that keyboard because our donor one seems to be less yellowed a little less Grody and in generally better wear so you know why not we might as well take it right but what was initially going to be a fairly simple repair is now ballooning into a gigantic mess and then it got worse because all these broken standoffs got me paranoid and I started noticing that every single standoff in our case is covered in cracks these are all going to fail so we're going to need more JB Weld and I'm gonna just goop all of these boys up with glue I'm not taking any chances with this thing breaking in the future these screw posts are a lot harder to repair than they are to reinforce alright so while the glue is setting and hopefully preventing any more of these standoffs from cracking and crumbling inside of this machine I do want to talk about another upgrade that we're going to be doing here now back in the early 90s Apple used scuzzy hard drives in laptops these were really really high-end at the time they were higher capacity faster and much more expensive than the normal slow IDE drives that you would find in most other laptops however they're 30 years old now and a lot of them are failing and it's very very hard to find replacements now my machine does have apparently a working scuzzy drive but it's not the original one and I think that gives us an opportunity to upgrade and so this is what we're going to be using instead it's called Blue scuzzy V2 and this is a smaller version that is meant specifically for power books this is a Raspberry Pi based system that emulates a scuzzy hard drive and connects with the exact same pins but then instead of running off of a hard disk it uses a Micro SD card how about that so with the glue now dried it's time to assemble the machine again and the first thing that we have to do is put the brass screw threads into our 3D printed holes this is super easy just put a hot soldering iron on it and they'll melt right in and seat perfectly it's really cool to watch and now let's go ahead and reassemble the entire machine foreign so with everything now repaired this thing is running like an absolute dream if we power it on here one of the things that is really incredible about running this thing off a Micro SD card is it's completely silent there's no moving parts inside this machine at all now except for the floppy disk drive which of course is only going to run when we put a floppy disk in it and we're in it boots up really fast once it recognizes the hard drive because obviously even your crappiest micro SD card is going to be faster than a 30 year old hard drive and this thing runs completely silently it's so cool so now let's go ahead and see if we resolved our issue with the floppy drive by swapping it out okay well it snaps into place so that's good I can hear it working so that's good oh there it is it shows right up on the desktop and there we go now I can enjoy a good game of Flappy Mac which is a modern Recreation of Flappy Bird featuring a classic MacIntosh and honestly it's uh it's impossible I I can't get more than like two oh my God oh high score four oh now if we open up the desktop folder I can show you that here we have 440 megabytes available because this disk image was formatted for 512 megabytes I do have to give a huge shout out to Steve from Mac 84 who helped me image this hard drive and put it on the SD card it works amazingly well it's so simple and it basically runs exactly the way it did before but I don't have to worry about the hard drive failing ever it really was amazing to spend the day fixing a 30 year old laptop with modern components we've got a Raspberry Pi with a Micro SD card and 3D printed components that have now repaired a 30 year old laptop so that it can continue to work for years to come I think if there is one more thing that could be done on this machine it's probably replacing some of the caps in the display we we have a couple of vertical horizontal lines here and those can often be a sign that the Caps might need doing so apart from that I think everything in this machine is perfectly sorted and would last for years and years to come you know what else could last for years and years to come is your subscription to the Luciano YouTube channel so go ahead and do that down below let me know your thoughts on this Restoration in the comments and again big thanks to everyone for watching I will see you guys in the next video foreignguys I really I really need to be banned from eBay because I keep going on there and buying some cool stuff today I bought this it's the Macintosh PowerBook 180c and it is arguably the first color laptop that Apple ever made it came out in June of 1993 and it boasts an 8.4 inch active Matrix display now the big crucial thing there is active Matrix because technically this is not the first color power book that Crown would go to the Macintosh PowerBook 165c which came out the previous October but most people agree that that thing was kind of smelly and not very good and the the screen looked pretty bad and it was also slightly lower resolution so it wasn't a great success this on the other hand is the first time Apple put a colored display in a power book and it was good and so I bought one um but it it's uh it needs some work oh that sound it's so great you gonna work oh you hear that there goes that old hard drive I'm not sure if it's original but surprisingly it boots except there are one or two issues so the first of those issues is the trackball it has no issue going left and right but uh we don't have up and down so you're basically stuck clicking on the top menu and and that's about it fortunately I have an external mouse that we can connect all right we are all set now we can move around and we can actually find out more about this Mac so this is running Apple system software 7.5.5 and you can see we have a whopping 14 megabytes of ram if we turn the machine around you might be able to see that the Gap in the screen up here is slightly smaller than down here and while the screen is definitely a little loose you can see this bottom part flexing yeah I'm pretty sure that the hinges are a little bit shot there's also something um loose in here yeah you hear that however the biggest issue is the floppy drive because when we go ahead and insert a disk like that after a few seconds this error message shows up the disk is unreadable by this Macintosh so I think we've got a pretty good list here of problems to address on this laptop to get it back to full working order so let's start by tearing this thing open a little bit because I want to see what's going on in there but first today's video is sponsored by delete me back when this PowerBook 180c was new in 1993 there weren't too many concerns about data privacy but now things have definitely changed delete me is a privacy service for reducing unwanted personal information exposure on the public web delete me has removed more than 35 million pieces of data for their customers with each person averaging over 2 000 pieces that can be found over an average two-year membership duration after signing up all you have to do is submit some basic personal information the you won't delete me to find and in just seven days you'll get a report with all the data they found and will remove from data Brokers data Brokers such as these whole wow oh God that's a really long list it's no wonder why I and other YouTubers that I know have used delete me to get some of our information off the internet so take back control of your online data today use my code and the link in the description down below to get a whopping 20 off a full year subscription big thanks to delete me for sponsoring this video and now let's get back to it lift up Up and Away there we go we've got two halves of a power book take a look at our modem Port down here it's an atnt branded sub board that just sits on top of the logic board and it says replacement so maybe this was upgraded after the fact let's go ahead and pull out the trackball because I want to see if we can get this cleaned out and working now this is going to be hard for you guys to see but there are two little wheels one here and one here and that is our two directions right so the trackball moves around and it and it turns these little rollers in here you can see these little blue rollers and you can see for left and right the wheel is spinning now for up and down it is also spinning now you're really not going to be able to see this but I did just notice that this little tab right in front of the wheel was just slightly bent now as it happens that little tab is integral to the trackball it's the LED that it uses to determine the movement when you move the trackball that little blue roller turns a wheel that has spokes in it on the other side of it is an IR sensor and it's able to read the interval at which that wheel is spinning blocking the light from the LED and that tells the computer how fast and where to move the mouse okay we're now booted let's see oh my gosh guys it that fixed it with one small victory under my belt I opened up the machine again this time to go after the display there's just a couple of screws holding this thing together and the display panel comes right out of the back housing and sure enough the screw posts are absolutely annihilated this is an Infamous issue on these power books so I started clipping away at the plastic and eventually had to whip out the grinder so I could saw through this mess and after honestly over an hour I was able to get it sanded down enough to where I could use these 3D printed hinge Replacements which I'll link down below so I whipped out the JB Weld because we don't want these things going anywhere it is completely baffling to me why Apple decided that the only reinforcement these hinges needed were some small brass threads pressed into very flimsy plastic but we're not going to make the same mistake so while those hinges are curing let's go ahead and pull out our deceased floppy drive now as I was pulling this out I discovered yet more destroyed screw mounts this really does seem to be a thread on this machine pun intended and for what it's worth the floppy Drive looks pretty nasty as well gosh well there's a lot more to this project than originally met the eye obviously we've got the screen hinges which completely fell apart even in here the floppy Drive standoffs have fallen apart on the bottom casing and there's a couple of minor things like the keyboard is fairly yellowed so we need a number of replacement parts and this being a 30 year old laptop they're not exactly plentiful so I got the next best thing another laptop that's right this is a PowerBook 145b so it's not the same exact model but this cost me forty dollars and it doesn't work however a lot of the parts are interchangeable obviously the screen and the bezel the whole top case really is different but we don't really need that the keyboard should be the same and crucially that floppy Drive should be the same now we don't know if this one's going to work it's a bit of a gamble but for 40 bucks with a bunch of parts to choose from I'm gonna take that gamble taking apart our donor machine I found yeah you guessed it yet more completely annihilated plastic standoffs this floppy Drive isn't really being held down either so let's go ahead and remove it when I took the bracket off I did notice something interesting this also seems to be a replaced hard drive and it's being held in with like wood anyway let's pull that drive out at this point I also figured I might as well go ahead and harvest that keyboard because our donor one seems to be less yellowed a little less Grody and in generally better wear so you know why not we might as well take it right but what was initially going to be a fairly simple repair is now ballooning into a gigantic mess and then it got worse because all these broken standoffs got me paranoid and I started noticing that every single standoff in our case is covered in cracks these are all going to fail so we're going to need more JB Weld and I'm gonna just goop all of these boys up with glue I'm not taking any chances with this thing breaking in the future these screw posts are a lot harder to repair than they are to reinforce alright so while the glue is setting and hopefully preventing any more of these standoffs from cracking and crumbling inside of this machine I do want to talk about another upgrade that we're going to be doing here now back in the early 90s Apple used scuzzy hard drives in laptops these were really really high-end at the time they were higher capacity faster and much more expensive than the normal slow IDE drives that you would find in most other laptops however they're 30 years old now and a lot of them are failing and it's very very hard to find replacements now my machine does have apparently a working scuzzy drive but it's not the original one and I think that gives us an opportunity to upgrade and so this is what we're going to be using instead it's called Blue scuzzy V2 and this is a smaller version that is meant specifically for power books this is a Raspberry Pi based system that emulates a scuzzy hard drive and connects with the exact same pins but then instead of running off of a hard disk it uses a Micro SD card how about that so with the glue now dried it's time to assemble the machine again and the first thing that we have to do is put the brass screw threads into our 3D printed holes this is super easy just put a hot soldering iron on it and they'll melt right in and seat perfectly it's really cool to watch and now let's go ahead and reassemble the entire machine foreign so with everything now repaired this thing is running like an absolute dream if we power it on here one of the things that is really incredible about running this thing off a Micro SD card is it's completely silent there's no moving parts inside this machine at all now except for the floppy disk drive which of course is only going to run when we put a floppy disk in it and we're in it boots up really fast once it recognizes the hard drive because obviously even your crappiest micro SD card is going to be faster than a 30 year old hard drive and this thing runs completely silently it's so cool so now let's go ahead and see if we resolved our issue with the floppy drive by swapping it out okay well it snaps into place so that's good I can hear it working so that's good oh there it is it shows right up on the desktop and there we go now I can enjoy a good game of Flappy Mac which is a modern Recreation of Flappy Bird featuring a classic MacIntosh and honestly it's uh it's impossible I I can't get more than like two oh my God oh high score four oh now if we open up the desktop folder I can show you that here we have 440 megabytes available because this disk image was formatted for 512 megabytes I do have to give a huge shout out to Steve from Mac 84 who helped me image this hard drive and put it on the SD card it works amazingly well it's so simple and it basically runs exactly the way it did before but I don't have to worry about the hard drive failing ever it really was amazing to spend the day fixing a 30 year old laptop with modern components we've got a Raspberry Pi with a Micro SD card and 3D printed components that have now repaired a 30 year old laptop so that it can continue to work for years to come I think if there is one more thing that could be done on this machine it's probably replacing some of the caps in the display we we have a couple of vertical horizontal lines here and those can often be a sign that the Caps might need doing so apart from that I think everything in this machine is perfectly sorted and would last for years and years to come you know what else could last for years and years to come is your subscription to the Luciano YouTube channel so go ahead and do that down below let me know your thoughts on this Restoration in the comments and again big thanks to everyone for watching I will see you guys in the next video foreign\n"