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Very lucky day and for £5!

L

lil

Guest
Hiya,

Deciding my old Power Macintosh 7200 which I use for classic stuff, I was offered a 7500 for £5 today, knowing it was cheaper to upgrade I agreed even if I did end up getting passed on to someone else.

So I drove there to collect, turns out he's throwing in a free Sony Trinitron CRT, and an ADB mouse and keyboard. Very handy I think. Except the RAM is not 256, as he had advertised. He fiddled around, and in doing so the 7500 kept on bombing, so he had a look out back. He came back some time later with a 8500/120. It's the same but in a tower unit. So he powers it up, it works, 160MB. So all is well, I carry out a 8500/120, Sony monitor, ADB mouse and keyboard and a free 7500 to boot for spares or repair. £5 job done..

I get home and notice the XLR8 sticker on the tower. Then I notice a 68pin SCSI connector on the backplane, plus a actual VGA style 15pin connector - this is what he connected the Trinitron to. So it has a graphics card too, not bad!

I open it up and notice a massive heatsink, one much bigger than needed for a 604 120MHz PPC. It's in the daughter card slot too..

I go to Apple System Profiler, and it turns out it has a G3/333MHz with 1MB L2 cache!!

What an awesome bargain for £5 :flower:

Vicky
 
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Wow that is a great deal
 
OP
L

lil

Guest
Benjamindaines said:
Wow that is a great deal

I thought so too :flower: the graphics card is a Formac ProFormance 80 card (8meg VRAM vs. 2meg built in) and not been able to identify the ultra-wide 68pin SCSI card, but it has an 8pin DIN socket too.

Apparently these beasts can take 1GB of RAM too!

Vicky
 

dtravis7


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That is a Great deal. I have an 8500/120 and yes it will take 1GB RAM. It's in Pairs.

Is that CPU Mod a Sonnet with a large purple heat sink by the way? If so I got OSX 10.2 to run on it with XPostFacto.
 
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L

lil

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dtravis7 said:
That is a Great deal. I have an 8500/120 and yes it will take 1GB RAM. It's in Pairs.

Is that CPU Mod a Sonnet with a large purple heat sink by the way? If so I got OSX 10.2 to run on it with XPostFacto.

Nah it's the XLR8 G3 thing made by Daystar (the other big name in accelerators).

I don't really want to run OS X on this, believe it or not. The reason for having the machine is so I can run all the software that did not make it to OS X :) Plus it'd slow it down unnecessarily.

I presume this takes 5v DIMM memory like the 7200 and 7500?

I might have another 32meg laying around somewhere to bring it up to 192MB - not bad for what I was only expecting to be a free 7500 with 16MB.... :flower:

Vicky
 

dtravis7


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The only reason I tried OSX was at the time it was my only Mac that could run OSX of any kind and I was itching to try it! Now I use it with OS8.6 for old programs like you do.

Yes, It's 5 Volt RAM. I have found a lot of it on Ebay.

OSX was sort of slow but hey, at least I was finally able to mess with it at the time anyway!

I remember the Daystar Upgrades for the Mac.
 
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L

lil

Guest
dtravis7 said:
The only reason I tried OSX was at the time it was my only Mac that could run OSX of any kind and I was itching to try it! Now I use it with OS8.6 for old programs like you do.

Yes, It's 5 Volt RAM. I have found a lot of it on Ebay.

OSX was sort of slow but hey, at least I was finally able to mess with it at the time anyway!

I remember the Daystar Upgrades for the Mac.

Excellent, I am glad the memory is relatively available on eBay. Since I have OS X on the PowerBook G4; my hankering is fine!

I have tweaked the system and initialised the second hard drive (yep it had the base 2gig scsi drive and an 8.4gig scsi drive) so all the old documents are gone, and deleted a lot of the old software that I do not use and indeed isn't licensed to me.

So far it is working great - the PRAM battery needs replacing as it won't keep the time.

Otherwise, I'm very happy - I have Word 5 running now which is my favourite word processor for really crunching some words. I will install Excel 4 soon, Photoshop 5 and Quark 4, and Claris Works 4. (Like I say, a whole bunch of nice applications to install -- I prefer Claris Works 4 to AppleWorks 6 for some reason despite them being superficially the same).

I still love my OS X machine; it is so fast compared to the Power Macintosh 8500 (boot up still takes a while), but it is also great to see OS 8 on the screen too; the user interface I am most familiar with. (Well System 7.1/7.5 but this is virtually the same anyway!)

The case it very yellowed but so is the 7200 of mine, the only thing that's a shame is the front of the case's clips seem to have broken on one side so it doesn't fit flush with the chassis.

Otherwise for £5, I am not moaning :flower: I think all I would do for this machine is upgrade the memory, otherwise 10gb of drive space, and the speed of it is great for what I need.

Vicky :flower:

EDIT:

http://www.xlr8.com/Apple_Mac_Products/XLR8_Macintosh_Products/Mac_CPU_G3_Upgrade_MS_PS.html

That's the G3 card in question.
 
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If you want to max out the memory, I recomend OWC (www.macsales.com) they have new warenteed 128 MB sticks for these old work horses for about $15 US. The weak dollar probably almost makes up for the shipping to UK ;-) Unless of course you can find another surprisingly good deal on ebay.
 

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