IT'S ALIVE!

[Juliet Elysa]

Today I finally pulled my Performa 635CD out of my closet and set it up. Part of me was honestly expecting to see a Sad Mac or something else equally fatal. After all, it was in the closet for 1-3 years. Time sometimes isn't kind to technology. However, it started right up and works great! There are a couple of minor problems though. The base of the monitor is broken, so the monitor wobbles if you so much as blow on it. Also... there is no diagnostic software anywhere. Not even Disk First Aid! 8-o

Is there anything I can/should do to keep the Performa running? I'd rather not have to deal with serious failures, since those are usually harder to manage than maintenance. According to this thread the PRAM battery's dead, but it doesn't seem to be causing any real problems. (How long do those batteries usually last? The machine was bought new around the time I was born, and since I was 5 or so it was doing the blank bomb error thing. Maybe longer, since I don't remember much before then.)

 

[Juliet Elysa]

This is a pretty old picture from the last time I had the Performa set up. I was going to take some new pictures today, but my camera had to run out of batteries right at that moment. Oh well, tomorrow (or whenever I get around to it) is soon enough! :lol:

 

[olePigeon]

Recap and fresh battery.  Although if it was bombing since you bought it, it could have something else wrong with it.  Perhaps a bad memory stick.  Next time it bombs, write down the error code.

 

[Elfen]

Definitely - replace that battery! That's a must.

Anything else? Well a recapping will be needed eventually, but for now it works and that's a plus! Maybe an upgrade later on to a full '040.

I have the PowerPC version of that machine, and it needs a system clean up. That uses an IDE Drive? That would be easy to put in an IDE-SSD or CF/IDE-SSD, if you had the System CD to format it and install a system on it. It would be less of a strain on the PSU to make that move and speed things up on the Disk I/O side; HD's can take up to 5watts of power while an SSD can take .2 watts.

 

[Juliet Elysa]

Recap and fresh battery.  Although if it was bombing since you bought it, it could have something else wrong with it.  Perhaps a bad memory stick.  Next time it bombs, write down the error code.

No error code to write down, hehe. Literally all of them look like this one. :lol:

Is the battery necessary? Removing the dead one is on my list of things to do, but unless their absence will cause a problem I'm generally not a fan of using batteries since they can be bad for the environment. I'm not sure I have the System CD or if it's all on floppies, but I think I still have them somewhere. Maybe Disk First Aid is on them.

 

[Macdrone]

I'd say bad system install. Try a newer system or get an enabler

 

[Bunsen]

Try starting up with extensions off - hold down the shift (?) key from power on until you get the desktop or the bomb error.

You can remove the PRAM battery without issue, the only thing is it will forget the date & time between power-ups.  And you may have to do the double-boot trick, though that varies from model to model and I don't remember if the 63x is affected by that.

 

[Juliet Elysa]

The hard drive has been completely erased with a new system install at least once or twice a year when the computer's regularly used,and the bombs have always appeared even after the fresh installs.

The only pattern I've noticed is that they appear when I leave the computer running for an hour or so without using it. Other than that they don't appear a lot, it doesn't seem to be anything more than the occasional bomb everyone gets every now and then.

 

[Hardcore SysOp]

Oh my gosh! The bomb! Now that is one image I surely do not miss! Now watch me get one in SheepShaver! 

 

[Juliet Elysa]

Oh my gosh! The bomb! Now that is one image I surely do not miss! Now watch me get one in SheepShaver! 

:lol: Before I discovered Sad Macs the bomb terrorized me as a child. It was scary...

 

[Hardcore SysOp]

The Mac OS X equivalent is probably the revolving colored "beachball", or whatever Apple calls it. The nice thing about it though, is that unless in the Classic environment where the bomb freezes up the entire system, Mac OS X code is so compartmentalized,/sandboxed, that usually, only the app in use is affected, and can be forced quit, leaving the system as a whole, running. So that is one big improvement from OS 9 to OS X which I appreciate.

The fact that one does not need to set a memory allocation for each individual app is also nice.

 

[Juliet Elysa]

Agreed. The lack of memory protection is a major fault in the classic Mac OS (though memory protection alone obviously doesn't make a great OS... my Windows machine crashes way more than any of my vintage Macs do > &lt.

 

[Hardcore SysOp]

I just realized that I made a typo in my previous response to you. I wrote "unless in the Classic environment where the bomb freezes up the entire system".

I mean to say "unlike in the Classic environment where the bomb freezes up the entire system"

But I bet you already caught that.

 

[Juliet Elysa]

LOL, I didn't even notice that until just now. My brain automatically replaced unless with unlike.

 

[olePigeon]

By error code, I meant the Sad Mac at the beginning (before it even boots) when you get the Death Chime.

My guess is the memory.  Try taking out 1 of the sticks and use it for a while.  If it bombs, put it back in and take the next one out.  Repeat.  Hopefully it won't continue to bomb and you can track down the bad memory.

 

[Juliet Elysa]

Just now saw your reply, life caught up with me. It has never given me a Sad Mac or death chimes without someone/thing pressing the interrupt key combo. It's been super reliable for almost 20 years, minus the bombs. The only pattern I've seen is that the bombs usually only appear when the computer is sitting idle for 30-60 minutes. If I remember right, when I was using it regularly as a kid it crashed (any type - freezes, sudden gibberish on the screen, bombs, etc.) so rarely during normal use that it wasn't a problem. It did happen, but no technology is perfect right?

Next on my list of "tests" is turning it on and leaving it alone while watching with a stopwatch to see if it ever bombs and, if so, how long it takes. Going to do that a few times to see if my pattern is actually a pattern or just a coincidence.

Taking out a stick of memory without replacing it and using the computer won't cause any problems long-term will it? I'm mostly just curious about what's causing the bombs, it's not enough of a problem by itself to warrant fixing.

 

[olePigeon]

Shouldn't hurt it.

 

[Juliet Elysa]

OK. Will give that a try when I can spend some quality time with it, knowing my luck if I rushed through I would break something.

When a bomb appears on the screen, do all the programs in the background freeze? Like, if I was running a stopwatch program would the stopwatch stop counting? That would be a lot easier than having to constantly watch for the error.

 

[techknight]

I believe the system error dialogs are modal. So the whole thing locks up. Unless you have macsbug or something installed to intercept it and continue, or if you had norton crashguard.