Apple Macintosh Powerbook 150

Resources

Wiki
everymac.com
Service Source

Internals

Motherboard

Memory Module

Lifetime Memory Products / Jedi Memory B.D. 48.42802.000 93398-SB

Display

Sharp LM64183P, marked ACER D/C EE539

Another compatible display is CASIO MD800TT10-C1, marked ACER D/C EE504.

Backlight of the display is based on CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp). The lamp replacement can be still purchased, the suitable size is 165mm x 2.0mm. It is best to solder the original wires directly to the lamp and use the original rubber insulating caps.

If display cover hinges are broken, it is possible to glue the hinge directly to the cover and screw it to the base. It is easier to do it with the right hinge, where there is no ribbon cable.

Display and Keyboard Adapter Board

This board is a home to the clock backup battery. The battery is likely to leak and destroy the traces on the board. The computer will start correctly without the battery, but it will not preserve time and date.

Hard Disk Drive

IDE AT Quantum Daytona 256AT

It is possible to replace it with a modern IDE disk emulator. I had troubles to make SD card adapters work, but I succeeded with PCMCIA IDE adapter like the one below.

Installing a new OS on Powerbook 150

This machine has an internal ATA disk, not SCSI, which makes the procedure different to other powerbooks.

Grab a floppy with Powerbook 150 ATA disk initialisation utility in raw image format. Write it to a floppy, run it and initialise your HDD.
If you install from a CD, set CDROM to ID 5. It should be terminated, please mind there are no other storage devices on the SCSI chain. When HDD is cleanly initialised, you don’t need to press anything during boot, just insert the boot CD when a disk question mark is displayed, it should boot. I recommend burning disk images with lowest speed settings, this increases chances they will be read correctly by the old CDROM drive.
Find an appropriate OS version and installation images. This is not easy. Officially Powerbook 150 supports OS’es 7.1.1-7.5.1, 7.5.3-7.6.1, but here is what I found:
- OS 7.5 from floppies – installation ends with error, no useful details provided
- OS 7.5 from CD – CD did not boot properly, I might have a wrong image
- OS 7.5.3 from CD – image MacOS753CD.zip from Macintosh Garden works fine and installs correctly. It includes CDROM support out of the box. Images from other sources I found hanging during installation. You can install later 7.5.5 update on top of 7.5.3.
- OS 7.6 from CD – with standard 4MB memory, there is not enough RAM to load the installer