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[TheGrandPubaa]

I am trying to do a bit of cleaning and fixing up on my old iBook G4. It has seen better days at this point, but does still turn on and work. I just did a round of Cro-Mag Rally last night on it as a matter of fact. The focus of this post is the PRAM capacitor. As I was cleaning up some of the internals and the case of the iBook, I noticed a leaky cap soldered next to the external ports(USB/Firewire/etc). There is a bit of corrosion on some of the solder points/vias, but I may have caught it before it's too late. I've been using some white vinegar to neutralize the leaking acid. I still need to remove the dreaded heatsink/heatpipe and check underneath that for other areas of possible corrosion, but that still leaves the issue of the capacitor.

If I don't mind resetting my clock every time I start up the computer(which has a dead battery so I run the laptop without it), can I safely remove the cap and not bother replacing it, or will the iBook refuse to boot without one? I'll attach a photo that's hopefully a bit clearer than some of the others I took in the recent past.

*Edit: Well, I guess I answered my own question there. I clipped out the PRAM cap and gave the whole area a decent wiping down with white vinegar and q-tips and went over that later with 91% isopropyl alcohol and a toothbrush. I put the iBook back together as far as it had been when I had initially discovered the leaky cap and lo and behold, it starts right up. It even seems to have fixed the missing boot chime problem it had. I haven't stress tested the iBook yet, but I did do a lap in Cro-Mag Rally at 1024x768 which ran like butter. Sadly, one of the pins on the ram connector is giving me issues so I am stuck with the built-in 256 MB of ram, but I might just install Panther to make it feel like 2005 when I first got the computer and thought 256MB was great.

[Astroman]

that thing looks like a supercap (to buffer ram state instead of a regular battery)
if you replace it, all should be normal again - but you probably don't want to run through the whole process again

[TheGrandPubaa]

that thing looks like a supercap (to buffer ram state instead of a regular battery)
if you replace it, all should be normal again - but you probably don't want to run through the whole process again

Right. I wouldn't necessarily mind putting in some kind of non-leaking replacement of some kind, but I am loathe to put any real money into this iBook since it could just as easily be replaced outright. The only reason I am messing with it to begin with is because it was my second Mac ever and my first laptop and so has some good memories.