Ron wrote:
But, as you said. Most of what I have learned about computers I can
attribute to playing with my PTPro.
There's a good point.
My first 'real' computer was a used SE/30 ($2500) with 8 mB ram that
had a quirk. It would give a musical riff upon startup and then sit
there doing zip for about 2 minutes, then boot up and run perfectly.
I lived with this quirk for years until an opportunity popped up to
move to the 'powerPC' level in the form of a freebie PowerCenter 132
with the 'gray-screen' syndrome.
Upon researching the problem, I learned that the cache dimms used on
the PowerCenters were notorious for failing, and when removed the
PowerCenter would - and did - work perfectly, albeit slower than
normal.
It was that experimentation though, on a then 'outdated' machine,
that helped me understand the hardware side of computers - especially
the importance of cache, and ultimately ram.
I had never attempted to open the SE/30 before then, to try and fix
the quirk, due the worry that I might screw up an expensive item that
otherwise worked well. With the PowerCenter working, and pumped up
with success, I opened the SE/30, and found that one of the 8 simms
was slightly ajar it's moorings, which caused the initial 'ram
failure' chord upon startup. Apparently the ram simm made good enough
contact after the unit had heated up a bit that the problem
disappeared after a couple of minutes.
Since then, I have never hesitated to play around with the giblets of
my computers, and although a G4 Digital Audio @ 1 gHz is now my main
unit, I still use a PowerTowerPro bumped to G4-375 daily as a printer
dedicated unit because - it keeps on ticking !
While I agree that spending serious jelly on any PowerComputing
machine is economically mad, there are so many upgrades and
peripherals readily available for mere pennies that it can be a lot
of fun continuing to acquire goodies to load them up.
And speaking of peripherals, now that scsi, adb, serial ports and
older PCI cards have also been obsoleted there is no shortage of
freebie items available for playtime in the basement.
And the SE/30 ? It now runs a 33 mHz 030 cpu with 256 shades of gray
on it's cute little 9" monitor, along with OS 8.1 and 80 mB. The
breakthrough to OS 8.1 came from swapping out the 'dirty' ROM simm
from the SE/30 with one from a Mac 2FX. (Thankyou Gamba for that
knowledge).
Back in the day (1990 or so) , the thought of pithing a 2FX ( @
$10000) to increase the abilities of an SE/30 would have been quite
insane. Nowadays it's just nuts...=)
Finally, I recently picked up a working G4 - 466 (Digital
Audio/Quicksilver mobo) for US $135 on eBay. That was the cost of the
XLR8 G4 CPU (another eBay buy) I stuffed into the PowerTowerPro a
couple of years back. Will it finally displace the PowerTowerPro as
my second 'printing computer' or remain as a backup for the main unit
in case of failure ?
Time (and space) will tell...
Cheers...Michael
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