Apple Service Source

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powerbook g3 / pismo in the park
A while ago the display on my powerbook started to come loose. No, it is not falling off, but it's tilting backwards all the time. Bang! Slam! Smack! Down in the table it goes. Really Bloody Frustrating. I want it fixed.

Back in the days I could take a Powerbook 5300 apart and put it together again in just over no time. Except for the displays. The displays were always a pain.

Gustav told me there's no way to tigthen the screws keeping the angle of the display when it's open. Did he try? He has a Pismo just like mine. It sounds too odd to me, but I haven't been ambitious enough to take it apart and check it out yet.

Some days ago while waiting for a database to add some indexes, I searched around to see if I could find instructions on how to take it apart. You see, it's not just unscrewing all the screws. To take a laptop properly apart there's a billion small plastic things you have to twist and push, and everything must be done in the right order.

I did find some guy who replaced the LCD in his Powerbook Firewire. Very encouraging at first. The best part though, was that he said I could search for the "Apple Service Manual".

You see, back in the days the Apple Service Source was what made me able to take the laptops apart so quickly. They have instructions on how to do everything, including the little hints not to bend the round thing before you have pushed the other thing or you'll break the third thing.

So a bit of googling later, I find a list of Service Source manuals. Brilliant. This is The Good Stuff if you need to take your Mac apart. You might have to Google some more if your Mac is of a newer date though.

Looking at the manual it does seem like Gustav might be right. Grrh. If I can get to the screws at all, it looks like I have to not just take the powerbook apart, but also take the LCD apart. And even then it's not clear from the pictures (around page 100) that I can tighten the screws at all. Arrgh! I am definately getting AppleCare for my next PowerBook.

While searching for the above, I noticed that some kid has been terminated from his job in one of the Apple retail stores for having a couple of screenshots of "Internal Apple applications" on his website. Pretty dumb. And pretty cheap of pbzone.com to make a story out of it (and thus certainly not making it easier for the poor guy who made the mistake of putting them in a publicly accessible folder). Or maybe I got it backwards.

Viridiana brought me "Dried Bing Cherries" a while ago. I just started eating them. They are really good.

13 Comments

Uh oh. I hope you don't have the same problem I just had. The brackets in my Wallstreet PowerBook failed, and I just replaced them last night. Apparently this problem is becoming epidemic, but Apple is not being terribly helpful. Mostly this is happening in Wallstreet PB's, but rumor says that Pismo brackets are starting to fail too. Check out this page for more details:

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~kenao/unhinged/

BTW, Thanks for the service manual link. Very handy.

I'm not sure I entirely agree about the Apple retail idiot. See Helliferocious (http://blog.islandspirits.com/blog.php?id=1 ) for some thoughts I agree with.

--Nat

Casey,

Thanks for the hint. That is absolutely indeed exactly precisely the problem. It seems like I can get replacement parts from http://www.pbparts.com/ (at $89 a pop; yikes!) The pbparts.com guy told me that he can't buy the screen support for the Pismo in North America, so he has to get them in Europe and hence the high price. Maybe I can get someone there to find them for cheaper. First I need to open it up and figure out which side is broken. The pain.


Nathan, I agree wholeheartedly. I just thought the pbzone.com coverage seemed cheap. I didn't realize that he had an O'Reilly CD Bookshelf thing online too. If so then I'll remove my last bit of pity for him. :-)

- ask

Links to the service manuals are fantastic. Thank you.

PowerBook G3 LCD Replacement was very helpful - thanks

Do you know where I can get a service manual to a laserwriter IIf/g.
I have to change out the power supply.
thank you
Ron

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I have wanted several of the laserwriter service manuals for YEARS!

My modem is gonna melt as I get 'em while I can!

Bob in Philly (PA) USA

The manuels were GREAT!!! It's a shame I didn't find your site a week ago...my LCD on my G4 broke (from a fall) so I took it apart to remove the cabling etc; and in that stint I must have damaged the fan or the heat exchanger because after I was charging my ipod, I thought I powered down and woke up to a melted computer boohooo...do you think my airport card or hard drive are still salvagable???
Thanks again, your info is priceless!!!!

Hello-
Thanks for the link to the Service Source Manuals. What I am in search of is the Apple Display Service Utility application. It is listed on the page you gave, but it's a password protected ftp site. If anybody has it, please let me know!!

Thanks!

Allen

my service keeps dropping down too fast and i cant seem to get it back all that fast, what can i do to get it back up agin...for good?if you could help me that would be great!!!


-Sarah

hello, thanks for the link in your post. I used it last week to get the powerbook_fw.pdf manual for a friend in dire need of repairing his pismo. however, this weekend something happened at work and my hard drive is dead, so the manual is gone. After recovering my work hard drive i tried to go back to the link and get the manual, and apparently over the weekend the link disappeared. Do you know where I could find the powerbook_FW.pdf file for repairing my friends Pismo?

Thank you.

I also am ISO of the powerbook_fw.pdf manual to try to take apart my screen to look into a hinge problem - If anyone finds it, i would so greatly appreciate an email at aprilthompson at hotmail - many thanks!!

Well, most of the links to older Service source docs are now dead, probably no thanks to Apple being aggressive about copyrighted materials.

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This page contains a single entry by Ask Bjørn Hansen published on February 11, 2003 12:36 AM.

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