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As you spend time repairing machines, mostly by swapping parts,
inevitably you wind up with a hulk with nothing
in it that works - it's just a place to hold parts. Bad motherboard.
Gummed up floppy. CD won't eject. Questionable power supply. Things
like that.
One day a person donated a gutted Quadra 630 which had been completely
disassembled. I don't know the story, but this machine not only had its
cover removed, but the motherboard was missing any installed RAM, and
the side and front panels and power supply were lying loose as well. It
looked like someone had tried to fix it and had just gotten tired and
given up. The owner said she thought the motherboard was bad, but she
wasn't sure. I put the thing back together (sans the missing
parts).
Well, I didn't have any Quadra motherboards to spare, so I stuck the
box in a storeroom and mostly forgot about it, until I read on Low End
Mac's Performa and Power Mac 5200, 5300,
6200, 6300 Issues page the following passage:
These machines were unique in that they represented a new
minimalist form of hardware engineering - one user studied the design
and called it a Quadra 630 with a PowerPC upgrade built in. These
machines were built around the Quadra 630 form factor.
Well, it occurred to me that since I had several dead 5200s sitting around - victims of a power surge -
I might try sticking a 5200 motherboard in the 630's case and see if it
would work.
Here are the two motherboards, side by side:
As you can see the internal socket that seats the motherboard and
provides the nice drawer-style access is identical. So, in a nutshell,
I inserted the motherboard - and it worked!
Even though the 5200 is justifiably a Road Apple, it is a Power Mac - and I need
Power Macs to run Vernier software's Logger Pro software for connecting
sensor equipment to my Macs. So I stripped the good parts of the 630
and the 5200, added a spare monitor (somehow I always seem to have an
extra monitor around), and voila! I have another machine as good as
half of our teachers are using.
In my humble opinion, what Apple needs to do is to offer 5200 owners
a discount on a new iMac, and then let them keep the 5200s. The 5200s
are slow, but they do run AppleWorks 5 adequately. That would generate
huge sales (if you'd ever used a 5200 running OS 8.6 you'd know,
believe me) and spread goodwill at a time when Apple needs to boost its
education efforts. Somebody tell Steve, please. These 5200s are killing
our evangelism efforts. We're getting ready to buy a bunch of iMacs and
Dells - a deal like this would shift the proportion, I'd be willing to
bet. A lot.
Here are the rest of the photos showing the process.
Removing the 630's motherboard requires pulling on
this little handle.
Push hard to seat the new motherboard.
The 5200 has a slightly different slot arrangement
that will prevent the 630's cover being replaced unless you remove this
panel. Don't forget to fold up the handle.
That's it! Move over the RAM, and you've got yourself a new machine.
You need to put a label on the front to say it's a 5200 and not a
Quadra, or some tech admin will come along and toss your machine
because it's not up to standard. Actually, this is the third
"conversion" I've done. I use one as a student workstation, and another
teacher has one, and this one hasn't been assigned a home yet.
Now, if I can just find a way to fire up the leftover 630
motherboards.
Jeff Adkins is a science teacher who isn't afraid to state his preferences in computing platforms. In his classroom he has everything from a beige All-in-One to a a G4 XServe, and they all work together nicely. He calls himself the "poster child for technology integration" in the classroom. He was the 2006 Outstanding Educator of the Year for the California Computer Using Educators (CUE) organization. He also maintains a site for astronomy teachers at www.AstronomyTeacher.com.
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with nothing
in it that works - it's just a place to hold parts. Bad motherboard.
Gummed up floppy. CD won't eject. Questionable power supply. Things
like that.
