>Recently, I had great fortune at a
>benefit fund-raiser sale. I landed a Performa 635cd (in great working order,
>and with all of its original internal parts) along with a ton of far out of
>date software and manuals, a global village external modem, and an apple
>laser writer 300 for virtually nothing. I have since also purchased a late
>model apple 15" monitor to go along with the setup
Congrats and welcome to the list. Every collector at some time had to start
from scratch... ;-)
>Enough background...I'm hoping you all can guide me a bit in bringing this
>rig closer to a useful state. I would like to RAM it up to 64 megs
Seems like you heard about the machine taking 64 MB SIMMs contrarily to
what Apple sources say. If you are lucky finding a 64 MB SIMM, this will
make you the king of 68 MB real estate, as 4 MB are soldered to the mobo.
>I would also like to install a big hard drive and an ethernet
>card, and upgrade to OS 8.1. Intended use would be a glorified jukebox -
>somewhere I could stash a ton of mp3's and back-up other files from my main
>mac. Is this realistic?
For the HD, ethernet card and 8.1: no problem. All of these worked fine for
my son's 630 which is more or less the same machine. Any IDE drive will do;
as the 63x series were Apple's first computers to adopt the cheaper IDE
mass storage, it was early-generation interface, too, and newer drives fall
back to the older specs. For ethernet you can choose between two
interfaces, the more common "LC-PDS" and the "CommSlot". If you don't want
to drag the external modem around, you can even put a modem in one of the
slots and an ethernet card in the other. Both cards exist in both flavours,
but take care to get "ComSlot I" material. Later machines used the
"CommSlot II". If you don't have a OS 8/8.1 CD, they are available at eBay
for next to nothing.
For the 635 as a MP3 jukebox, think twice (and get advice from people more
knowledgeable than I am in this matter). AFAIK MP3 on 68k machines is a
PITA, if it works at all. Storage only would be OK, naturally.
>Can a current generation OS X machine communicate
>with an older OS 8 machine over a network?
Yes. Don't forget to enable AppleTalk on the OS X machine.
>How and where should I look for
>hard drives? I know this machine requires a PIO 3 hard drive (I only know
>the term, not exactly what it means except for its impact on transfer rate).
>Will any IDE drive work, and will it simply "downgrade" to that standard, or
>do I need to seek a hard drive that is specifically that type?
For compatibility, see above. Older hardware (and cables!) work OK with
newer drives, the inverse is not true. A guy in our MUG keeps trying to
persuade me to keep away from older drives ("older" in his terms means more
than 2 years of age), but he's a dealer and a network professional so I
just think he's biased. I have some HDs in my Mac garden that are about 16
years old and still going strong, others have died that were only a couple
of years old. As always, backups are recommended for anything you attribute
any value to, and a main machine that is meant to help you earn your money
deserves a new hard disk on a regular basis, but a fun machine can do with
less. YMMV.
>What other pitfalls are there? What are some must-haves that I'm
>overlooking? I'm intrigued by the TV tuner (not present, but it sounds like
>a nice upgrade), does anyone have any experience with that?
A nice gadget for the 63x series is the remote control, especially if you
want to use the computer for music playback. It shipped with the machines
as a standard at the time. The TV tuner is nice, too, and it works well in
its little window as long as you have an analogue TV signal - in Germany
terrestric analogue TV broadcasting will end in 2005 :-(( . There is also a
video digitizing card that works, albeit a bit slowly due to the 68LC040's
lack of muscle. My son has had a lot of fun with all these toys (and he
learned quite a bit using them), but if you are thinking about some serious
work, including MP3s, forget about the 635: you're far better off with a
PowerMac. The pre-G3s are inexpensive nowadays and quite useful for
non-leading-edge purposes. For your idea of an MP3 jukebox I'd rather go
for a 7600 or the like.
HTH. Have fun, OM
/"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign
\ / No HTML/RTF in email
X No Word docs in email
/ \ Respect for open standards
--
Quadlist is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and...
Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Enter To Win A |
-- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299 | Free iBook! |
Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html>
Quadlist info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/quadlist.shtml>
--> AOL users, remove "mailto:";
Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/quadlist%40mail.maclaunch.com/>
Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
