Based in Milton Keynes, England

530Cs

The 530Cs is a tough machine to love. In IBM's promotional material, along with a lot of it's documentation, the machine seems to share the spotlight with it's slightly smaller and equally tough-to-love little brother, the 230Cs. 

Both machines are considered 'ultraportables' with a very small footprint and unfortunately quite unreliable DSTN colour LCD displays.

They also are both notorious for their Varta hibernation batteries along with their main batteries all tend to leak green horrible flaky corrosion.

Model IBM Thinkpad 530Cs
Machine Types 2605
Release Timeframe Sold from May 1995 until May 1996. 
Preceded by 510Cs
Superceded by The 535
Motherboard Specs  
Display Specs 8.4" DSTN LCD

 

After a long running saga trying to get one of these working, after working through three seperate, non-working machines, I managed to combine the good bits and make one good one. And here it is, working:

At least these machines are easy to tear down and although many have suffered in the humid Japanese climate, they are a fun machine to try and repair. The 230Cs is a successor of the much loved RIOS 'Monolith' PC110 machine, and in some ways this seems to be related.

I have a few of these machines and the journey to have one working complete one is still happening. One of the first things to do is to remove the VARTA battery from underneath the LED status bezel:

Once you've removed a bunch of screws, you can pull the motherboard off from a couple of daughterboards which stay in place. The mainboard has 7 through-hole capacitors which do not tend to leak. If you attempt to replace them, it's worth knowing that i've found the solder to have been originally used on these boards to be quite troublesome. I'm not sure if it requires a higher melting point or it's just really annoying but it's hard to remove and it tends to block your desoldering gun. Use a lot of flux and try and mix in some fresh solder.

On the mainboard which comes off first, here are the 7 capacitors:

On the remaining two daughterboards, there are some surface mounted capacitors:

On the daughterboard above, I've tried replacing the small surface mounted aluminium electrolytic capacitors with both new ones, polymer ones and with tantalums and the power delivery seems to work fine using all three - as long as you keep the same number of uF.

The LCD

The LCD has some very easy-to-get-to capacitors on the back. They were leaking.

Here are some pictures comparing it against the 535X:

Teardown

Here is a complete teardown of the 530Cs. My example here is quite rough with plenty of internal corrosion caused by the Varta hibernation battery. It also has vinegar syndrome on the LCD due to a hard life in Asia.

1) Turn the unit upside down and remove the 4 base screws:

2) Remove the LCD indicator bezel by simply pulling it up (and out of the rear tabs), and then unscrew this centre plate:

3) Snip the IBM branded 3-cell Varta battery out:

4) Remove the 3 screws holding down the top of the keyboard:

5) Remove the screw under the keyboard inside the floppy connector cover:

6) Unplug the 3 keyboard connectors:

7) Unplug (by pulling up) the 2 screen connectors and the small 2-pin MIC connector:

8) Remove the 4 hinge screws:

9) Slide up and remove the whole lid along with the horizontal plastic standoff that sits underneath it:

10) Unscrew 6 screws from the motherboard along with the speaker connector:

11) Lift off the black plastic insulator:

12) Lift off the motherboard, which is friction-connected to the 2 daughterboards in the middle-left-back section:

13) Remove the top-left screw from the daughterboard:

14) Remove 2 further screws from the daughterboards:

15) Pull out the IR transceiver:

16) Remove the final screw from the daughterboards which holds in the IR cover:

17) With the last of the PCBs removed, here you can see what damage has been done with the leaking green corrosion from the batteries:

18) Back to the motherboard, remove the three HDD screws:

19) If you remove the 6 rear bolts either side of each connector, the metal shielding will also come off (which is necessary to reveal all the fuses):

20) You can also inspect the parasitic damage done by the 3-cell green battery - here you can see that it's seeped through the PCB and damaged a lot of components on both sides. In this case, this motherboard is a write-off:

21) Finally, if this little thing on the left pings out, it's from the top LED bezel and goes in the little reset button:

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PS/note (2141-182)

This rather unusual US-designed PS/note feels like an experiment in case and PCB design. It has it's own unique design flairs, badge, internals and case. This was in a world where the US and Japan were each competing for IBM's value range of notebooks which were entirely distinct from the high-end business Thinkpad 700-series.

Most of these models were 25Mhz 386SL machines although there was a 386SX variant too. They came with 2Mb RAM, upgradable to 10Mb, and 85Mb 2.5" IDE hard drive and a 640x480 64-Greyscale passice LCD.

Spot the (almost) entirely unique square case badge, which some have attributed the style to alignment with IBM's PS/1 value desktop range. It's somewhat confusing because the original Japanese PS/55 note shares a similar name (and badged as simply a note) and indeed a lot of machines are also PS/notes with a suffix of it's specific model to provide easy referencing (in the West alone you had the PS/2 note N33sx, N51sx/slc, PS/note 425, a PS/note 45SL). It's like a team within IBM were trying to restart the note brand to the West by saying 'here is THE note'.

This type of case badge was only seen also in the probably unrelated PS/note N45SL design by Zenith, which became the Thinkpad 300.

As a result most people refer to this as the note 182.

Read more: PS/note (2141-182)

IBM External Floppy Disk Drives

Due to the different IBM labs and companies developing IBM portables and the time period over which they existed before USB, there are a lot of different types of IBM floppy drive.

Whilst we're only covering external here, there are at least 3 types of connector:

26mm / fattest: Found on the 701c

21mm: Found on the PS/notes, 850, 7xx tablets. 360, 365

17mm / Thinnest: Found on the later models which favoured optical drives built-in such as the 755CD, 760, 600 and various 3xx series. Ultraslim floppy drive.

21mm

This early floppy drive 66G5069, also known as "UltraBay Diskette Drive enclosure" actually contains the original multibay floppy within it's large outer shell. There are also fixed standard external 21mm drives.

These ultrabay floppy drives came in various models from various manufacturers, so externally each 66G5069 drive may look the same, but internally it could be totally different.

TEAC FD-05HG

Here we have a TEAC FD-05HG drive, which has one eletrolytic cap, which as far as I know should only be replaced with an electrolytic. I have had drive read issues by replacing these with a solid capactor. It's a 100u / 10v capacitor seen below:

You can get away, like I did with a 7.7m through-hole capacitor with the legs splayed outwards:

Whilst it's open you may (or may not) want to clean the magnetic heads with a little IPA and check the corkscrew spindle which moves the heads forward and back across the diskette is moving smoothly.

 

Even though this 7.7mm tall capacitor is longer than the original surface mounted cap, it still just fits under the floppy drive chassis - although you cannot go any more than this.

Sony MPF720-2

And here is another 1.44Mb ultrabay floppy drive - the Sony MPF720-2 (weirdly suggesting it's a 720Kb drive, but it's a 1.44Mb drive):

This Sony drive is similar, but you do not need to remove the little PCB in order to replace the 47uf capacitor:

In this case, small 6mm through hole capacitors with the legs splade are a good replacement:

 

 

 

 

750 Series

I've managed to restore an almost complete set of the 750 series machines. Here are some of the collection:

Read more: 750 Series

Translating PS/55 note Japanese keyboard to English keyboard mapping

If you connect a western keyboard to the earliest PS/55 and PS/55 N23 SX notes, the keyboard mappings are all messed up. Here is a rough map of what key is mapped to what real keypress:

Read more: Translating PS/55 note Japanese keyboard to English keyboard mapping

IBM 5535 Multistation

IBM Japan had a range of Kanji-character-enabled desktop computers, called the Multistations. This was part of that family with the addition of a greyscale LCD display. Although 5535 is the 'laptop' range of machines, With the sheer size and weight (7kg), I think you would consider it more like a 'space saving desktop', much like the IBM Convertible. It has a sibling called the 5535-S which has a slightly different design and is 'less boxy'.

Read more: IBM 5535 Multistation