Laptop Restoration Weekend

This weekend project included restoring 2 vintage laptops. Both of these were given to me by good friends. The first is a Apple PowerBook 540c I got in high school but dreaded opening it up do to the extremely brittle plastic. The other is a Texas Instruments TravelMate 4000E I got from a colleague while working at TI.

Apple PowerBook 540c

Features

• Color Screen
• One of the first laptops with an internal track pad

Issues

• Screen jumbled
• Power brick is missing case

Watching an Action Retro teardown for guidance

Lets tear it open and see what we can find

Oh, it works now. Nice. It must have been a loose connector or something. Don't worry, I cleaned up the fingerprints

Anyways, im going to see what we are working with.

Must have been a high school girls personal laptop. Back together it goes.

Lets fix the power brick

Texas Instruments TravelMate 4000E

Texas Instruments TravelMate 4000E 486 WinDX2/50MHZ Active Matrix Color

Features:

• Color Screen
• CPU: Intel 486 @ 50MHZ
• No internal trackpad or mouse

Issues:

• No power
• No power cable

The PowerBook was a pretty easy fix, lets home the same goes for the TravelMate.

First thing, the power source.

Yea, the Nickel Cadmium battery is going to have to go. In the meantime, lets power ti directly. I don't the the power supply for this guy, and the power connector is very unusual. I am going to power it directly through the battery connectors.

This was pretty tricky. Each NiCd battery is 1.2V so these terminals should be expecting 4.8V. I tried that and got screen tearing similar to the PowerBook. I upped the max current and that seemed to do the trick. I guess the Floppy drive, spinning disk, degraded caps, and old electronics need 5.5V and up to 4A (22W) momentarily on power up.

There we go! You can see the power cords snaking from the bottom battery compartment. This machine has MS-DOC with Windows 3.1 installed. The HDD was also working, but felt like it was on its way out.

Based on some of the files I found on here, it looks like this belonged to a former DLP products employee at TI.

It has one of my favorite pieces of software! Mathcad!

Anyways, lets see if we can replace those batteries. NiCd isn't very popular but I was able to find some replacement cells om Amazon

I tried to source a charger but I was not going to spend this much on a charger.

DIY it is. I did manage to find a replacement connector for the TravelMate. No I jest needed to figure out the pinout. This was pretty hard but I think I figured it out.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/i6etum/ti_travelmate_4000e_power_supply_schematic/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/ixsgys/a_friend_of_mine_gave_me_this_laptop_didnt_come/
• https://imgur.com/UCAKbEC