Mac Daniel's Advice

Not Raising the Dead

Manuel Mejia Jr - 2000.05.22

At my last update, I was in the process of getting 1 MB SIMMs for my deceased Mac II. One factor that I kept monitoring throughtout the repair process was the total cost. Given how the price for replacing a non-functional Mac II with a functional one comes to about US$40, I did not want to spend more than $20 in order to raise the dead.

Mac III had already spent $17 on parts to replace the dead PRAM batteries on the logic board. Other parts came from very generous donors who are regular readers of Low End Mac. Several people emailed me privately and offered to give me ram, hard drives, and other useful parts. All that was needed was a postal mailing address to ship the parts to. Based on this experience, I developed a new appreciation for the Macintosh community. I can now note that one good way for an old Mac user to get parts is to just ask for them on a newsgroup or listserv.

One can also get parts by the barter method. I recently traded some old System 6 800k floppy disks and an ADB mouse to an Australian in exchange for an official Sydney 2000 Olympic Games backpack. I wanted one, but could not get one locally. The trade was quite fair - I got the backpack I wanted, and the Australian got the equipment needed to get a recently acquired Mac SE operating.

Even with the donated RAM installed, the Mac II still refuses to boot up. Since I have changed other parts and verified that they function, I now concluded that the logic board I have has either a blown fuse or some other fault. Since a fuse replacement was going to break my allotted budget of $20, I elected to abandon the effort and move the Mac II hard drive to a spare Mac LC that I have. I then stripped the Mac II of memory, video board, power supply, and both 800k floppy drives (all functional) and put the parts in a storage box. Someday those parts may get traded out to someone in exchange for a few postage stamps and a shipping address.

In this instance, I did not raise the dead. However, I have parts that could be of use for some other's "undead" Mac. LEM

Manuel Mejia Jr is familiar with Mac IIs, LCs, and older PowerBooks. He uses his Mac LC, PowerBook 145B, and PB 100 with System 7.1 on a regular basis and recently added a Mac Plus running System 6 to his collection. He's quite familiar with both System 6 and System 7. He also owns the Pina books on repairing compact Macs from 128k through the SE. You can read more about Manuel's computers in Manuel Mejia Jr's Four Old Macs.

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