[NTLK] Off Topic: Macintosh SE/30 - to buy or not to buy?

[Forrest]

Which is exactly what happened to my Mac Classic.

I also had an Atari 1050 5 1/4 disk drive in storage that I got out about a year ago. It powered up once, then quit, and there was that odor--kind of a humid, salty chemical smell. Old leaking blown capacitors. I called Mouser (electronics supply house), and working with a very nice and patient salesperson I was able to order replacements for ALL of them (about 15, including three larger ones) by having her search for suitable substitutes. She warned me that these replacement components were rapidly becoming obsolete, which is very bad news for those of us with these older machines.

I replaced ALL the caps, not just the ones I thought were bad (the best choice) and the drive powered up again as new. There are two others in storage, and I'll have to do the same with them, eventually. It's been a year now and I hope it's not too late--I should order the replacement caps now. (The Atari computers and components are holdovers from the early 80s for me and are rarely used today, except to play Omnitrend's excellent 1984 game "Universe.")

The plus side of this is that the total cost was something like $35 with shipping, and I ordered about twice of what I needed for most of them.

Thanks,
--Forrest


Sent from my AT&T iPhone 4

On Sep 10, 2012, at 1:05 AM, James Fraser <wheresthatistanbul-newtontalk at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The problem is that, as Dylan points out in the opening paragraph, even if such a machine has never even been powered up, the capacitors are still aging, regardless (and very probably leaking by now in a machine Apple stopped making in 1990).