PowerBook 1400 CD ROM

[MacUp72]

thanks, I'll try that..I saw that on the right side of the panel, but wasn't sure, didnt want to short anything.

 

[RZ1400]

Well, I have just recently bought a 1400 on eBay for nostalgic purposes, had one as a kid I bought out the newspaper classifieds.

It’s in pretty nice physical shape, only thing is it looks like someone stripped out all the ram modules so it only has the 8mb soldered to the board
It came with a 12x CDRom, and I messed with the laser pot to no avail.

But by the stroke of pure luck, I had one of those old slimline dell desktops (P4) that I just never had gotten around to throwing away. I pull out the CDRW and it is the same connector.

It recognized it somewhat and fit fine(besides the bezel) but wasn’t working/reading discs.

I soldered pins 47 and 45 together and sure enough it started working. Recognizing it as a Matashita CD-RW.

It reads discs fine, unknown on burning as I am stuck at 7.6.1 because the Mac OS 8 installer is asking for at least 12mb.(won’t install)

Is there any cd burning software for 7.6? Just for curiosity’s sake if it will work.

 

[Snial]

Amazed 7.6.1 would work in 8MB!

 

[RZ1400]

Amazed 7.6.1 would work in 8MB!

You think 7.5.5 would be better at least until I can find some more ram?

I even managed to connect it to the internet over wifi last night using an old router and wavelan gold card, successfully opening and using frogfind! But it freezes up pretty often with icab, and to a lesser degree Netscape.

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

Yeah I hope you didn’t pay too much for that one - base model passive matrix and the RAM card’s missing. These were never supposed to even run in less than 16MB from the factory and you’re seeing why. Wouldn’t be much of a problem is RAM upgrades weren’t so hard to find for these (and expensive). Good luck with finding one, as you’ve seen here not much can be done with them so so little RAM.

 

[LaPorta]

If it is missing it’s factory RAM card, I’ve got a bunch of those.

 

[RZ1400]

I got it for $60+ $10 shipping..

There is a g3 upgrade on eBay. But I don’t know if I’m ready to put 300 into it lol.


And LaPorta yes it’s missing the factory non-stackable module. Do you have the factory 8mb module? They had 4mb(base base model) and 8mb modules I think. I will pm you when I get off work.

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

Alright that’s a good price for what you got. Good luck getting yourself a RAM module! It’s not awful on 16MB but would definitely benefit from a bit more, plus the 133 or 166 processor card. The base 117 has no L2 cache so it’s a tad bit slow. Just stuff to look out for.

 

[Snial]

You think 7.5.5 would be better

I'm not suggesting you switch, maybe 7.6.1 has the same memory management as 8.0 which is better. My PB1400 came with 7.5.3 and that seemed to take up about 5MB (of the 16MB I originally had, but maybe it was using loads of extensions). Also, the first PPC Mac I ever used was a friend's 5200 and because of the RAM issues with that, I advised him to get 12MB to begin with (which I think he did). I'm simply impressed you seem to be getting by with just the 8MB! But I guess you have VM turned up to16MB?

I personally prefer Mac OS 8.1, because I used it a lot on my 100MHz PowerBook 5300, which was an even slower machine than the PB1400 and really like it (classic enough to run most classic stuff, modern enough to support HFS+ and act a lot like the last version of Mac OS). It seems to take up about 7MB when booted.

at least until I can find some more ram?

Well, I have a spare 8MB system RAM card for a PowerBook 1400, but it's part of this eBay item (UK) which isn't selling and I want to sell all of it, primarily to gain a bit of space:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/204357531990

I even managed to connect it to the internet over wifi last night using an old router and wavelan gold card, successfully opening and using frogfind! But it freezes up pretty often with icab, and to a lesser degree Netscape.

I have a PCMCIA modem built-into my other PowerBook 1400(c), but I haven't tried to use it (no suitable connector).