Freecycle Comes Good...Twice

[TheNeil]

After months of absolutely nothing appearing on my local Freecycle group, someone advertised a Quadra 840av. I duly stuck my hand up and said 'yes please' and I got lucky.

Went over on Saturday to pick it up and the woman says 'Oh and is this any use?' pointing at a Umax Apus 3000. Any use? I nearly exploded with excitement. So, double score.

Now the bad news. The Umax has a dying hard drive so, as I promised to get all her data off it and back it up onto CD, it's being a little bit annoying. The 840 is in even worse shape. Hit the power switch and the power light springs into life and the PSU fan starts spinning but no chime, no hard drive whirr (three HDs and an Apple graphics card BTW). Pulled the RAM, VRAM, PRAM battery etc. but no joy. Checked the board and there was loads of crap on it so into the soapy water for you matey and it's been sat on the radiator all night drying out. Hopefully that'll do the trick. :-/

 

[LCGuy]

Best of luck! Whats the specs of both systems?

 

[TheNeil]

The Apus is 200MHz 603e with 1.8Gb hard drive, CD-ROM and 64Mb RAM

The 840 has three HDs (1Gb, 80Mb and 'other'). No idea of RAM, VRAM etc. but it has had a CD-ROM drive added (badly). Looks like the stock CPU (i.e. no upgrades) - I just wish I could boot the git so that I could say for certain

 

[LCGuy]

Very nice IIRC, the Apus (like the SuperMacs it was based on) has an IDE HDD, right? If so, tracking down a replacement should be very easy then.

Best of luck getting the 840AV up though

 

[TheNeil]

Very nice IIRC, the Apus (like the SuperMacs it was based on) has an IDE HDD, right? If so, tracking down a replacement should be very easy then.

Already got an IDE drive sat on the shelf waiting in, no doubt, eager excitement

 

[MacG4]

there is something you should know about the 840av's. sometime to get them to boot after they have been sitting around not being used for a bit. try powering it on like normal (maybe resetting the pram) and then just leave it powered on for about 15-20 and see if it boots. i have do this with my mine if it goes unused for a bit.

 

[Bunsen]

You could also try the quick reboot- leave it powered up for a half hour or so then very quickly switch it off then on again.

 

[TheNeil]

Thanks for the tips - I'll no doubt give them a try. The motherboard had a good wash to get rid of the crud and it's been drying. Now just got to find a spare hour to get it all plugged back together and see if there's life in that there varmint

 

[TheNeil]

It lives!!!!!

Plugged it all back together last night, hit the power switch and it bonged into life and went through the boot cycle. Of course that would have been too perfect a story though and there was, naturally, a problem. That problem being that my Apple monitor died quite a while ago and I've been using a PC monitor with a Mac adapter ever since - works great on just about everything...except 840av machines. Grr

Now to find a Mac monitor...