Low End Mac Reader Specials

TypeStyler For Mac OS X is Now Shipping! Download The Free Fully Functional 60 Day Tryout at www.typestyler.com

Don't install Parallels to play poker online! Poker Mac will show you how to download and install a native Mac poker application such as Full Tilt Poker Mac.

Laptop Hardware Provided by TechRestore - Overnight Mac & iPod Repairs.

Compare products like desktop computers, apple laptops, apple macs, and LCD Monitors side by side! All the information and reviews to make the best purchasing decision for new mobile phones, sat nav systems, or MP3 players. The Ciao online shopping community makes searching products easy for you.

Digital Fossils

Old Mac Restoration Is Sometimes One Frustration After Another

- 2008.06.17 - Tip Jar

Popularity:

Bookmark in del.icio.us

Would you like a glimpse into the fun and games of playing with fossil Macs? Of course you would.

Allow me to entertain you with how I spent last Friday....

Shortly before I moved to Indiana, a friend made a contribution to my Mac museum: He showed up with the bed of his little truck full of former educational Macs, with the explanation that some might be working and some might not, but I was welcome to them. We schlepped the whole lot into my attic, I dutifully entered them into my MacTracker program, and I promptly got too busy with work and preparations for the move to do much tinkering with them.

Last week, I decided it was time to start taking inventory of what exactly I had on hand, and so I set up a work station in the corner of the dining room where I could begin the process of sorting out what worked and what was just parts. I was going to start with the two Quadra towers, but I noticed that the 900 had "N.G." Sharpied on the side of its case, and the 950 didn't have an internal CD-ROM drive. I had an external SCSI CD drive someplace, but I didn't feel up to messing with it at the moment, and so I chickened out and went with the Power Mac 7100 instead.

The 7100 booted up smoothly, and a quick check showed it to be sporting 40 MB of RAM and a pair of 1.5 GB (!) drives. While the OS 8.6 upgrade was installing, I dug out my OS 9.1 CD and prepared to install the newer OS. Unfortunately, nothing I could do would convince the machine to boot from the CD-ROM.

"Okay," I thought, "we'll set that puzzle aside for later."

Next on the list was a Centris 650. I plugged it into the keyboard and monitor, powered it up, and got the big blinking question mark telling me that it couldn't find an OS. I already had my OS 8.6 CD in hand before noticing that the drive on the Centris was one of the archaic ones that needs caddies, of which I had exactly none.

Okay, the Centris gets set aside for later, too.

Back up to the attic I went, and down came the Quadra 610. Or so I thought. You see, the model number had vanished from the front of the case, so I used the info on the bottom to enter it into MacTracker. The case bottom had proclaimed it to be a Model M2113, which was definitely a Quadra 610. But if it was a Quadra 610, then why did it have an HDI-45 video port? Quick, Robin, to the Internet!

A bit of digging told me that what I had on my hands was a Power Macintosh 6100. The mystery only deepened, however, when the serial number on the back of the case was consulted. Everything I could find said that the standard 6100 had been discontinued in late 1995, but this one was clearly dated February of 1996. There was a version of the 6100 that had been produced into 96, however - the 6100/66 DOS Compatible, which had a 486DX/66 processor on a daughter card.

When I popped open the case, there was no daughter card. There was no riser for one, either, so probably it had been removed when the computer was decommissioned. Great. With no riser, I couldn't just pilfer the video card from the Centris 650 to do a hardware check. Now I needed an HDI-45-to-DB-15 adapter if I wanted to function test the apparent 6100. (And this still didn't answer why the data placard said it was an M2113...)

Having suffered through all this, the Quadra 950 didn't seem so daunting anymore. I decided to put my lower back at risk by hefting almost forty pounds of tower case down from the attic. Once plugged in, the 950 whirred smoothly to life. Nosing around revealed that it was running a pretty bare-bones install of OS 7.6, with 24 MB of RAM and a single 230 MB hard drive. But there was that "No Good" 900 upstairs - what was "No Good" about it? Power supply? Motherboard? CPU? Did it have RAM or hard drives I could salvage for the 950?

Were these wise questions to be asking a little after midnight on a project I'd started before lunch?

What's next? I could find a video output adapter for the 6100. Conversely, I could try to transplant its hard drive into the Centris 650. I could try to find a CD caddy for the 650. I could raid the 900 for parts to boost the performance of the 950.

I'm definitely open to suggestions.

Be sure to tune in for the next exciting episode of Digital Fossils to find out!

If you find Tamara's articles helpful, please consider making a donation to her tip jar.

Recent Digital Fossils Columns

Slot Loading iMacs: The SE/30 for a New Generation, 02.02. They're relatively small, pretty quiet, reliable, can run Tiger, and are very affordable nowadays.
The Old Mac blues, 07.23. Intel Macs are tempting, but the Power Mac 7100 will be not one more iota obsolete tomorrow than it is today.
Macs: Better by design, 07.11. From the beginning, Macs have stood apart from other computers with their attractive and intelligent design.
Master of Orion on the Mac, 07.01. The DOS version of this vintage game broke with Pentium or Windows 95, but the Mac version still runs very nicely in the Classic Mac OS.
More in the Digital Fossils index.

Links for the Day

Mac of the Day: 17" MacBook Pro Core Duo, Apr. 2006 - The top-end MacBook Pro includes a 1680 x 1050, 2.16 GHz Core Duo CPU, and supports Apple 30" Cinema Display.
Group of the Day: G4 List is for those using Power Mac G4s or G4 upgrades.
Support Low End Mac

Recent Deals

Best iPod nano Deals, 11.25. Refurb 8 GB 4G nano, $99; new, $126; refurb 16 GB, $129; new, $150; new 5G/8 GB, $134.60; 16 GB, $161.12. Shipping included.
Best Classic Mac OS Deals, 11.25. System 6.0.8 floppies, $10; 7.1, $12; 7.5, $20; 7.6 $13; 8.1, $11; 8.5, $20; 8.6, $90; 9.0, $20; 9.2.2, $30.
Best 15" PowerBook G4 Deals, 11.25. Used 1 GHz Combo, $400; 1.5 GHz SuperDrive, $449; 1.67 GHz hi-res, $600.
Best G4 iMac Deals, 11.24. Used 15" 700 MHz CD-RW, $150; 800 MHz Combo, $229; 1 GHz, $289; 17" 1.25 GHz, $200; 20" 1.25 GHz, $509.
Best MacBook Air Deals, 11.24. Used from $899; refurb from $1,099; new 1.6 GHz/120 HD, $1,150 after rebate; 1.8/64 SSD, $1,150 a/r; 1.86/128 SSD, $1,350 a/r; 2.13/128 SSD, $1,694 a/r.
Best PowerBook G3 Deals, 11.24. Used 233 MHz WallStreet, $75; 266 MHz, $160; 400 MHz Lombard, $199; 400 MHz Pismo, $289; 500 MHz, $350.
Best 12" PowerBook G4 Deals, 11.23. Used 867 MHz SuperDrive, $348; 1 GHz Combo, $379; SD, $519; 1.33 GHz, $529; 1.5 GHz Combo, $549; SuperDrive, $609.
Best Mac Pro Deals, 11.23. Used 2.66 GHz 4-core, $1,300; 3.0 4-core. $1,919; refurb 2.66 4-core Nehalem, $2,149; 2.93, $2,549; 2.93 8-core, $4,999; new 2.26 8-core, $2,290.
Best Time Capsule and AirPort Deals, 11.23. Used 802.11g AirPort Extreme, $49; 500 GB Time Capsule, $150; new, $190; 1 TB dual-band, $280; 2 TB, $469; 802.11n AirPort Extreme, $170.
More deals in our archive.

About LEM | Support | Usage | Privacy | Contacts

Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2009 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc., unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Advice presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
Access our RSS news feed at http://lowendmac.com/feed.xml.
Email may be published at our discretion; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. If you prefer your message not be published, mark it "not for publication." Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
PRIVACY: We don't collect personal information unless you explicitly provide it. For more details, see our Terms of Use.
Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iBook, iMac, eMac, iPod, iPhone, PowerBook, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.