I managed to pick up a Mac Quadra 840AV yesterday with an apple VGA monitor and Laser Writer II printer for $60 CAD (approximately $5 USD :-) off the local classifieds site. The pram battery had leaked pretty badly but seemed to only drip onto the internal RF shielding. After I cleaned everything up with isopropanol it booted fine off a startup floppy although the hard disk appears to be bad. Like most macs of this vintage it does seem to have leaking surface mount caps so I am going to order the standard tantalum replacements from digikey and recap the mainboard.
What is everyone doing for replacement 50 pin SCSI drives in their 90's hardware? Is there a reasonably priced flash based replacement yet? I remember looking into it a few years ago for my Sun IPX and the only solutions I could find seemed to be priced for industrial applications. Also, has anyone had experience with the apple power supplies of this vintage? I'm wondering if it's something I should recap as well? Also, any comments as to which classic mac OS version is best for this era of hardware? I haven't played around with classic macs much, I went right from the Apple IIe to PC's in the early 90's.
