We always ask people to tell us what they’ve been up to so we can include it in WeekNotes. Matt Carr has put together a longer article about how he fixed two Apple computers he found in the donation boxes at DoES, so here it is as a separate post. Please get in touch if you’ve got something you’d like to share!
On Tuesday I went to DoES to donate an old (and incredibly heavy!) PC monitor, when I saw a pair of small Apple Mac computers in the disposal crates.
These two are Mac Mini G4 computers from October 2005: a nifty miniature Apple desktop computer for home office and music production. They’ve clearly had a lot of use! One was labelled as ‘Faulty network card’ and the other as ‘Faulty CD drive’. If that’s all that’s wrong with them, I thought, then perhaps I can combine the two to make one working computer. Bear in mind I know absolutely nothing about Mac computers and have never used one!
Usually I’d test a computer before I cleaned it, but as I don’t actually own a Mac power supply, I decided to clean them first and then take a look inside to see if there even was enough stuff inside to make a complete computer out of.
For the aluminium and plastic surfaces, and rubber base, I used sticky stuff remover, antibacterial cleaning wipes, very dilute Fairy liquid and water in turn, all very very gently and sparingly.
Here’s a secret weapon against permanent marker on non-porous surfaces: a little bit of dry-wipe marker! It un-does the permanent ink, letting you clean it away with a cleaning wipe.
It took time, but it was definitely worth it. The units both look good as new. Time to have a look inside. One of the units was partially opened already, so somebody seems to have already tried to fix it.
To open a Mac Mini, you need to prise it open forcefully but carefully with a thin plastic prising tool: turn the unit on its top and push inwards using the prising tool between the metal and the plastic from the outside edge of the white boundary, moving around the edge. It isn’t easy, and the twenty-year-old plastic will not thank you, but it’s unfortunately necessary here.
I was surprised to see that there was RAM installed! I thought perhaps somebody had taken it to re-use elsewhere. This particular memory doesn’t seem to have been seated correctly on the left side. It is a bit of a tight squeeze. I’m going to remove the memory and clean its edge connector with lighter fluid on a cotton bud with a paper stem. I’m also replacing the twenty-year-old CR2032 motherboard battery.
The combined drives’ assembly unscrews and lifts out as one unit. The dust can be cleaned out with a soft natural brush or air rocket. Both of the Macs have an optical drive, an 80GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM – these must have been top-of-the-range Build-To-Order special units direct from Apple back in the day!
The one labelled ‘Faulty network card’ had an issue with its AirPort/Wi-Fi antenna. There’s a set of alignment pegs on the drive assembly where the antenna board is supposed to lock in place, but they’ve been bent out of shape. I’ve bent them back gently and cleaned and reseated the board.
It’s not a bad idea to also give the drives’ assembly circuit board connector, antenna connectors, and anything shiny that fits together a gentle going-over with lighter fluid.
Well, they’re as clean and as re-set as they’re going to be, let’s see what happens. Many thanks to internet personality GoBusto for the use of his power supply!
– *”dong!”* – How about that! They seem to power up fine – I just needed to clean and re-seat everything it seems. I thought I was going to have to combine bits and bobs from one computer into the other to make one working system, but they’re both working great right now. There’s a lot of testing to do – hard drive, memory, video, sound, wireless, Ethernet, USB, DVD drive…
Speaking of… what was the issue with the DVD drive on the second unit? There seemed to be something physically preventing putting a disc in the drive. Looking into the slot with a torch, I can see a white post blocking the slot. Is that supposed to be there…?
All the sounds the Mac DVD drive makes remind me of the loading mechanism of an old video recorder – you push the tape into the slot and a whole bunch of machinery takes over and loads the film into place. I had a suspicion that this Mac believed that there was already a disc inserted, I just had to convince the drive to eject this phantom disc. If you power up one of these Macs while holding down the mouse button, it’ll try to eject the disc (there’s no eject button on the case…). I can hear it attempting to eject, and that blocking post is moving about, so I took a risk and decided to try very (,very!) gently pushing a disc into the slot while this phantom eject was taking place, so that the machinery had something to grab onto and synchronise itself around.
It worked!
All the various gizmos inside the drive recognised the presence of the disc and re-set themselves correctly. I could eject and re-insert the disc just fine now, the Mac recognised the disc, and everything was perfect!
I’ve completely erased the hard drives on both Macs and reinstalled Mac OS X fresh on them. We’re watching DVDs, browsing the internet, and watching that ace computer games TV show Bad Influence.
For a little extra fun, I’ve dual-booted one of them with Mac OS 9! This means it will run all of the old Macintosh software from the 90s and 00s as well as newer Mac OS X software – so if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make some Wallace & Gromit-style inventions in The Incredible Machine!
A big thank you to whoever donated these computers to DoES Liverpool. Please consider passing on your old hardware to your local makerspace – a great many unexpected things can be fixed, or, if not, they could be used to fix something else!
– Matt Carr
mattcarr@gmail.com – you can contact me with questions about Mac stuff if you like
www.mrdictionary.net
