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I recently rescued a Mac Classic II from destruction, that had been sitting undisturbed for 6+ years. In the early days of my career I actually did tech support on these things. I remember one time I had one that was having problems booting, and the hard drive (80MB) was making this click-click-click sound. So I went to my supervisor and told him the hard drive was dead, and we were going to need to replace it. He said “No, here use this” and handed me a hammer. He went on to explain “Tap it a few times on the sides of the hard drive and try it again”. Well it fixed it! Thus began my weird and wacky relationship with the Mac Classic II.

Now, back to present day. When I rescued this Mac Classic II I decided to try and boot it. So I plugged it in and turned it on. All I got on the screen was a black and white checker board pattern. So I fired up Google to find an answer. I found one, but couldn’t hardly believe what I was reading. Wash the motherboard by hand, or stick it on the dish washer! You have got to be kidding.

However, I had nothing to loose, so I did. I opted for washing by hand. With a few drops of dish detergent in a sink full of water I swished the motherboard around for about 5 minutes, pulled it out, and rinsed it off really good. After letting it sit out to dry overnight, I put it back it, and fired it up. Almost immediately I was met with the familiar “bong” sound, and it booted right up!

The technical explanation I have found is that the capacitors leak fluid after sitting around for a while. This gets on the motherboard and creates short circuits. Washing it, removes these short circuits and allows it to boot again. Weird stuff.

So I need some input on what to make of this classic machine. We are collecting feedback on moreron.com

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 9:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.