G3 AIO revival attempts

PCDrs

New member
A little while back Performa (Alex) dropped off this rough but complete G3 AIO for me. To me the G3 AIO is the Holy Grail of CRT All in One Macs, a final evoltion of the platform started with the original. Everything after this seems to lack a certain completeness. Alex said it was stored on its side and some liquid got into it. Still not sure what it was. I tried an initial power on and thank goodness no smoke, but no POST either. Over the last week i've pulled and cleaned the motherboard on the unit. In the words of Dankpods "Someone's been in here." The CPU was not clipped in tightly at all and the remains of the thermal pad were gone. After a ultrasonic cleaning of the board and checking for corrosion I popped it back together and... minor change. Still no POST or power LED, BUT the keyboard lights now do a momentary blink. There is something further up the chain of self checks failing. Seeing that the CPU was almost floating around in the casing I am starting there. It had a 233 G3 and I have a 266 on the way for it. Long term if it starts to work the goal would be to swap in a G4 CPU from a later Mac tower, I did this before with a B&W G3, and what would be amazing is to figure out how to make an adapter to use an external video card with some 3D chops to drive the internal display, but I might have to settle for finding a 4MB video upgrade for the existing graphics. As a fan of 3Dfx a Voodoo 2 would be ideal since they can be used without modification in these PCI Macs, simply add a driver and off you go.
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Performa

Member
Looking good! I don't know if the previous owner did much with this one, the missing ZIP drive made me wonder if it hadn't been used as a parts machine by either for them or perhaps even by the school that had it first. Hopefully whatever issue it's having trying to start up isn't too hard to sort out from here.

Good luck sir! Keep us posted, and if there's anything I can do to help, say the word!
 

PCDrs

New member
I got to do some tear down time on this over the last few months. New CPU was a bust. Pulled out the power supply board from by the CRT and it looks pretty clean and no blown caps. As dirty as the case is the internals do not look too bad. Moving on to thinking I might have a bad voltage regulation daughter board on the mainboard itself. More as I can squeeze time in.
 
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