3 Color Classics - front
My wife is thrilled when I turn the dining room table into a computer repair workshop. As you can see from the photos above the patients for this day included two Macintosh Color Classics that refused to start up. The Color Classic web server was temporarily taken offline to serve as my “known working” device to test parts from the other two.
One of the two nonworking CC’s was purchased for a song from ebay with a known faulty logic board but everything else was promised to be fine. This proved to be true – installing an LC575 logic board into it produced a healthy startup chime and a clear bright screen when booted from the internal hard drive . Since the system file on the HDD hasn’t been hacked it produced a bus error when trying to load the Finder, but that appears to be a software issue rather than a hardware one.
3 Color Classics - reverse
The second CC is one that previously worked fine and even has a rare Sonnet Presto Plus accelerator card installed. After sliding out the logic board and removing the accelerator card I could see very evident traces of leaking capacitors. I’ve located a working replacement logic board but it’s just a matter of time before it also succumbs to the ravages of time and suffers the same fate, so I guess I will need to brush up on my soldering skills.
Sonnet Presto Plus accelerator and Color Classic logic board
The Color Classic web server is back online and I am still working on getting a spare backup ready to go to pinch hit in case of hardware failure. It is, after all, 17 years old. Back in 1993, when the Color Classic was released, Apple’s annual sales amounted to just under $8B, virtually all of it from sales of 3.3M Macs. In 2009 Apple’s annual sales were $36.5B, from 10.4M Macs, 54M iPods, and 20M iPhones.
