It all begins on April 1st. Of course it would all go wrong! Thats the day of the fool. I found a sweet lil eMac on facebook marketplace for £60. fully working. running MacOS 9.2 (im a classic macos enjoyer, sorry macos x). it was also pretty close. I just needed to get a bus there then an uber home. i dont drive and i have a prepaid bus pass right now which meant the journey there was pretty much free. hell, the seller was an artist like myself which i found cool.
so yes, i enquire and i manage to get the price down to £50. i prepare to pick it up in the evening the next day. the journey is pretty long. the seller is chill as hell and lets me wait in his house while my uber comes, he even helps me carry it into the car. man am i waffling right now. this things so fucking heavy by the way. i get it into my room and i plug it in and press the power button, nothing. okay, i think. ill just give it some time to charge up? i dont really understand this stuff at this point but i give it time and try it again and it makes a loud ass noise that scares me. at the time i dont know that the noise is just the degausser firing up. i message the seller and i realise that he doesnt really know that much about computers, he lets me know its been off for a couple months.
upon researching what could be wrong with this thing i come to the conclusion that either the capacitors have melted and the psu is fucked or the pram battery is dead. i think to myself that its gotta be the battery because why would the capacitors randomly blow when the computer isnt on and has been working for the whole time the other guy had it. I considered returning the computer though i didnt want to. the seller came to my house to pick it up and give me a full refund. he tries it out and it does the same thing it was doing for me. i ask if i can keep the keyboard and mouse it came with and he just asks me if i wanna keep the whole thing or itll end up in a landfill (really tugging on my heart strings). Im like super hungover at this point also, id been out drinking until 7am that day. I go sure and he gives me £20 back so i ended up paying £30 for the whole set.
fast forward to now, i open up the ram door and the capacitors seem to be fine though im not able to get a super good look because i havent taken the whole case off yet. im pretty scared of shocking myself with the crt even though i wont need to touch that thing. i wanna take the shell off so i can clean the whole thing because i saw spiderwebs (eew) so ill give it a better look then.
i tried following the advice of a good neocities neighbour of mine connorthevgfan78 and tried to turn the computer on without the pram battery. That didn't seem to change anything but it at least got me to pull out the old dead battery. it did make me a lot more comfortable with the machine though. I very much appreciate the advice. im hoping the new battery i ordered comes soon so i can just throw that in quick and give it another try. i was going to take the whole case off yesterday to deep clean it and troubleshoot a little more but my boyfriend got sick and went to bed and i didnt particularly feel brave enough to mess with the computer alone. im pretty scared of crts, i cant remember if ive already said that. i will be following the one hand behind your back method.. lol. I thought id also embed a video of what the computer does when i try to turn it on. it freaked me out so bad at first.
I gotta shout out ifixit.com and everyone who's contributed to the emac page for all the resources that have helped me with this so far. I have no idea how id figure anything out without that site. this is like sponsor lol. but i just wanted to link that site for anyone with broken stuff because its sooo handy i stg
uhh so the new pram battery arrived and it didnt fix it. i need to try resetting the ram. at least if it does get fixed it has a new battery. i still havent taken the case off to clean it and give it a good check out because im afraid. it made the computer stop degaussing every time i tried to turn it on. i think my next step after all that will be to replace the capacitors but if even that doesnt work im just going to sell that mf :(