Zeliard
Member
Hello fellow MLAers! 
After many years of eBay researching i've finally found and won the bidding for a Quadra 840AV which was always "the" Macintosh i wanted to have in my collection. Living in Germany, it's not that easy to get one because they are very uncommon here and most of them are already in collectors possession. Because of that i was willing to pay more than i usually would for such an old Mac.
Well, the moment arrived and i won the auction for around $110US. Bummer. That's a lot of cash, i thought. But i knew it would be worth the price.
So after two weeks of waiting, the package was finally delivered to me. It was quite a moment of joy when i opened and took out the badly packaged Quadra but things got worse from here..
This little Quadra was a smoker's machine. But that's not the problem. Judging by the eBay pictures i thought it just had a yellowered case when in reality, it was covered in dirt, on the inside and outside (some pictures: VRAM ports, inner case).
So before testing the machine, i took it apart to give it an in-depth cleaning. There was the next shock for me. Many plastic parts were broken off and littered around the mainboard. Luckily nothing that couldn't be fixed. But there was also a "ProNitron" graphics card which became loose. Because i wanted to use the internal video anyway, i just put the card away and concentrated on cleaning the mainboard. Then i noticed this: Click. Turned out that the card ruined some circuits near the DSP chip. Damn. Thinking that this Mac died before i could even use it was making me nervous. So when i put it together and turned it on there was a short moment of relief. It booted, with sound! But there was no happy Mac, it just seemed to stop before that, showing the grey screen. The Mouse was already there and even working. So what could it be? Booting again and zapping the PRAM didn't work. It just stopped and nothing happened.
Well, the next step was to try something different. I connected an old external SCSI drive to the Mac, hoping it would do something. And it did. Finally a smiling Mac and it booted properly to the desktop with no problems. It even showed the internal hard drives. Yay! I spent the next hour testing the machine especially it's AV functions and everything seemed to work. Well, everything except booting the interal hard drive without having an external SCSI device connected to the Mac. It really just boots from the internal hard drive when there's a device connected to the SCSI port. It doesn't even have to be turned on. Very strange.
Oh well, i guess i should be happy that the mac still works until i can fix that circuit problem. I already maxed out it's RAM and it really works great. Very fast, too. Still have to contact the seller. I'm really curios what he has to say about his packaging methods...
I apologize for my bad spelling.
After many years of eBay researching i've finally found and won the bidding for a Quadra 840AV which was always "the" Macintosh i wanted to have in my collection. Living in Germany, it's not that easy to get one because they are very uncommon here and most of them are already in collectors possession. Because of that i was willing to pay more than i usually would for such an old Mac.
Well, the moment arrived and i won the auction for around $110US. Bummer. That's a lot of cash, i thought. But i knew it would be worth the price.
So after two weeks of waiting, the package was finally delivered to me. It was quite a moment of joy when i opened and took out the badly packaged Quadra but things got worse from here..
This little Quadra was a smoker's machine. But that's not the problem. Judging by the eBay pictures i thought it just had a yellowered case when in reality, it was covered in dirt, on the inside and outside (some pictures: VRAM ports, inner case).
So before testing the machine, i took it apart to give it an in-depth cleaning. There was the next shock for me. Many plastic parts were broken off and littered around the mainboard. Luckily nothing that couldn't be fixed. But there was also a "ProNitron" graphics card which became loose. Because i wanted to use the internal video anyway, i just put the card away and concentrated on cleaning the mainboard. Then i noticed this: Click. Turned out that the card ruined some circuits near the DSP chip. Damn. Thinking that this Mac died before i could even use it was making me nervous. So when i put it together and turned it on there was a short moment of relief. It booted, with sound! But there was no happy Mac, it just seemed to stop before that, showing the grey screen. The Mouse was already there and even working. So what could it be? Booting again and zapping the PRAM didn't work. It just stopped and nothing happened.
Well, the next step was to try something different. I connected an old external SCSI drive to the Mac, hoping it would do something. And it did. Finally a smiling Mac and it booted properly to the desktop with no problems. It even showed the internal hard drives. Yay! I spent the next hour testing the machine especially it's AV functions and everything seemed to work. Well, everything except booting the interal hard drive without having an external SCSI device connected to the Mac. It really just boots from the internal hard drive when there's a device connected to the SCSI port. It doesn't even have to be turned on. Very strange.
Oh well, i guess i should be happy that the mac still works until i can fix that circuit problem.
I already maxed out it's RAM and it really works great. Very fast, too. Still have to contact the seller. I'm really curios what he has to say about his packaging methods...I apologize for my bad spelling.
