The Big Sad: your dead Macs ☠️

[galgot]

Have a bunch non working machines... most aren't in good shape, so these don't bother me too much, they are used as spare parts bank.
But, the two that bothers me are a PB 17' A1139 (only one I have) and a 15' A1138.
Both in perfect condition, as new. Both boot and can run... somehow...
Both have defect Vid chips, as soon as something 3d is used, displays goes psychedelic like on mushrooms :/

Oh, also have a Cube with screen and speakers, but I think the power board is dead (red light).

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

PowerPC
QS m8493 733mhz - donor/dead ram slots
MDD m8570 1.25ghz - donor/no psu/damaged lobo/missing caps
PB12 a1010 867mhz - donor/dead lobo
PB12 a1104 1.5ghz - donor/dead gpu
PB17 a1107 1.67ghz - donor/dead lobo

Early Intel
A1278 aluminum MB - working but dead KB & wonky touchpad.

 

[svamethyst99]

Well I decided to power up my 1.25GHz eMac that I've had for years only to discover that it no longer works. I've got a couple of other eMacs that are in far better shape than that one so it wasn't much of a loss to begin with. I'm honestly stoked my 800MHz 2003 one still works because those died A LOT... I also have a clamshell iBook from 1999 that will not show video anymore, I remember trying to use it in 2008 only to be met with a built-in memory failure. Not surprised about that one either because I bought it from someone who overclocked the CPU a little *too* high so that may have been a reason. To be honest, I never liked the clamshells anyway, even when they first came out. WAY too clunky for a 12" laptop, and honestly looked more like a prop from the Teletubbies than a laptop I'd feel confident taking with me.

 

[alectrona6400]

Well I decided to power up my 1.25GHz eMac that I've had for years only to discover that it no longer works. I've got a couple of other eMacs that are in far better shape than that one so it wasn't much of a loss to begin with. I'm honestly stoked my 800MHz 2003 one still works because those died A LOT... I also have a clamshell iBook from 1999 that will not show video anymore, I remember trying to use it in 2008 only to be met with a built-in memory failure. Not surprised about that one either because I bought it from someone who overclocked the CPU a little *too* high so that may have been a reason. To be honest, I never liked the clamshells anyway, even when they first came out. WAY too clunky for a 12" laptop, and honestly looked more like a prop from the Teletubbies than a laptop I'd feel confident taking with me.

some of the mid-lifecycle emacs are rather temperamental. some models its the analog board, some its the motherboard, and some its both. ATI graphics models are by far the most likely to fail because of defective motherboard capacitors. half the time i see ATI/2003 motherboards they always have at least 1 bulging or leaking cap.

 

[svamethyst99]

I agree. From 2004 to 2010 I used to work at an IT dept. for a school that mostly had slot loading iMacs and eMacs earlier on... the slot loaders always had failing PAV boards and half of our eMacs experienced capacitor issues; I remember having a directory of all of our computers and recall that most of the ones that failed were part of the 2003-04 model year. Honestly the most reliable machines we had were the G4 iBooks and HP Compaq laptops that teachers used. I say G4 iBooks and not the other snows because... the snow G3 iBooks were plagued with graphics issues. I have a 600MHz iBook that I have had since I bought it at Circuit City in 2002 when I was on a road trip (I had a 1400c that died) and that laptop has been through 2 motherboard replacements.

 

[alectrona6400]

well, i am working on another machine of mine that starts but has no video: an early 2004 eMac that I have had since about a couple years back. like svamethyst99's unit, this one had the same issue. honestly thinking the mobo in mine was screwed. i remember grabbing it out of a scrapyard bin for a buck so chances are the damned static electricity took its toll on the poor thing and only culminated to this board's demise now. could have also been the overclocking experiments i did, which were stable, but i guess repeated soldering to find the sweet spot (which turned out to be 1.67 on this unit) probably screwed something else up too.

i actually had a couple of bad caps on the PAV board in this emac and decided to (PAINSTAKINGLY) remove it. you're gonna have to take notes about where all these wires go if you want to recap an eMac analog board. i made a cap diagram here (i missed a few, because they're tiny and i cannot read the values on them without taking the heatsinks off with a soldering iron). mainly the big ones on the bottom left in the photo like to fail the most often, which seem to handle a good chunk of the eMac's power filtering. unfortunately replacing whatever faulty caps were on this board did not fix my issue, so i'm looking to try tracking down another 2003-05 eMac motherboard. :/

 

[svamethyst99]

Sorry to hear about your motherboard... hopefully you can track down a working replacement; they are getting harder to find these days...

 

[crimsonRE]

I have a 7200/120 and a 7600 w. a G3 upgrade that I believe I did not 'exercise' enough and eventually they no longer powered up. PS issues? Dunno, I'll have to reserve some time to diagnose their issues. I have a beige G3/266MHz that replaces them nicely for playing on OS 9 (and serving as a bridge machine for my SE's & IIci, having both Ethernet and AppleTalk).
My only other really dead machines are an SE/30 with an exploded battery (many years ago), and my first Al PB G4, a 1.5GHz 17" that took an unfortunate dive off the coffee table, leading to a dead(ish) display (will still display the OF text) and soon thereafter the HD died....
I do have an A1138 that has a weird issue - when put to sleep, it will not wake up and becomes very hot, as if a process is running the CPU extremely hard....

 

[Alexis Trinquet]

I have a 7200/120 and a 7600 w. a G3 upgrade that I believe I did not 'exercise' enough and eventually they no longer powered up. PS issues? Dunno, I'll have to reserve some time to diagnose their issues.

My 7500/100 came with a dead PSU, it wouldn't power up... I tore the thing apart and found out that one of the boards was cracked (and I had no idea if it would work if I had fixed the tracks up) so I caved in and bought a replacement.

Although since Beige G3 desktop PSUs have the same shape, I'm wondering if they could work with the TNT logic board that the 7500/7600/7300 use, but I haven't been able to find any confirmation.