Mel's Macintosh Universe: The Powerbook 3400c Pages
Mel's Macintosh Universe

The Powerbook 3400c Pages
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Reviving My Powerbook 3400c

My Powerbook 3400. I bought it used about 8 years ago. It was for a while my primary laptop computer until I bought a used iBook 700 last year after the hard drive on this computer went south... sort of.

The computer sat in my closet for about a year when I read an article about having this boot up from a flash card. I figured this was worth a try. So this is what I did:

I purchased a compact flash PCMIA adapter that fits into the card slot built into the Powerbook.

I had an extra 1 GB compact flash card laying around. Used that.

I formatted the compact flash card for Macintosh.

Booted the Powerbook 3400 with an OS 8.5 CD ROM.

Installed the operating system and the basic network package onto the compact flash card.

Rebooted the computer with the compact flash card after I changed the start-up settings control panel.

Installed older software that I have sitting around to make the Mac useful again.

Now I have a bunch of word processors, text editors, and HTML converter, JPEG viewer, iCab web browser and internet connectivity restored to this old Mac. It sits next to my Power Mac G4 where it is also connected to my network and uses the DSL net connection.

Makes for a great little internet machine and word processor.

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The operating system was upgraded to OS 8.6 a few weeks later.
My next post will be on how I turned this little old Mac into an oldies MP3 jukebox player.

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Copyright 1998-2006 by Melvin Ah Ching Productions. Last update: June 4, 2006.