168 MB in an 8100/80, what to do?

[Dog Cow]

All right, so I thought that the 2 GB HD in the Power Mac 8100/80 was toast, but it turned out that the System Folder had gotten unblessed for some reason. I booted up with a CD and did the Option-double-click-System-file trick and that fixed it. It's got OS 8.6, in case you were wondering.

The next thing I did was upgrade the RAM using DRAMs from the Baggie O' RAM which I got from fellow 68kmla'er wthww last July from 112 MB to 168 MB. That leaves me around 140 MB to run programs and do other stuff.

The big question: what should I do with all of this extra RAM? Make a huge RAM disk? Run some memory-hungry application? I need suggestions here, since even the 112 MB seemed really excessive to me!

 

[trag]

I like RAM Disks myself. Other than that, leave all your applications open all the time and maybe do some giant photoshop stuff.

 

[Dog Cow]

I wonder if calculating pi to some long number of digits would use up a lot of RAM...

I like RAM Disks myself.

I put the System file and Finder on a RAM disk and booted from that. It was pretty speedy!

 

[trag]

Write software with memory leaks and run it on the machine?

 

[Dog Cow]

Oh, that's useful.

 

[Dog Cow]

I think that some of the RAM might be bad, because the 8100 is now unstable. I'm getting random Finder quits, hangs, and even a System bomb on startup (you know, the fun kind, where can't even read all of the message).

Anyway, now it's the fun process of trying to identify which RAM module is bad. :

 

[trag]

I think that some of the RAM might be bad, because the 8100 is now unstable.

An X100 machine that old, there's a good chance that the heat sink grease is worn out. It turns dry and powdery with age and stops doing its job. Then the CPU overheats, and the thing starts crashing. Have you seen any video artifacts? That's one of the first signs of overheating, but it doesn't always happen.

Anyway, carefully remove the heat sink from the CPU, clean off the old heat sink grease (probably a powdery residue) with something like rubbing alcohol (the alcohol/water stuff, don't use anything with detergents, moisturizers, colors, etc.) and apply a tiny dab of new grease. Then replace the heat sink. Be gentle. Too much pressure can crack the somewhat fragile CPU package.

 

[Dog Cow]

The symptoms started after I added the RAM, which was about 2 weeks ago.

 

[H3NRY]

I wonder if calculating pi to some long number of digits would use up a lot of RAM...

Not unless you want it to. Just for the **** of it, when I first got my Apple ][ in 1977 with a meaty 16K of RAM, I decided to calculate pi to 1000 places. It took the little beast most of a weekend to run it, but it came out right to 999 places. Truncating error on the last digit. Shoulda calculated 1001 places and rounded. Anyway, the hard part was finding pi listed to that accuracy anywhere to check my algorithm. I eventually found the head of the university math department had a poster from IBM who had set one of their mainframes the task, and after a couple of weeks of grinding, they had done pi to 1000 places. They were so proud of the accomplishment, they sent these snazzy framed posters to every university in the country. Personal computers certainly did change the world!

 

[Dog Cow]

I used a 300 Mhz Power Mac G3 to calculate Pi to 1 million digits, and IIRC, that took less than 3 hours. I should get that program and put it on the 8100.