Franklinstein
Well-known member
Okay, so I have a set of 2400s that I've acquired over the past few months. The first one I picked up was a pre-production Japanese model (I'll put pix up on Flickr of this one soon). It was dead when I bought it, so I fixed it. Anyways, since it uses a TI PCIBus chip for the PC Card subsystem, it should support CardBus, right? So I slip in a USB card, and shazam! It slides right in with no undue resistance, and it shows up on the desktop. I put the proper drivers in, and it works fine. Neato.
Next, I buy a production U.S. model (because I don't want to travel with my other one). This one will allow CardBus cards to fit just as easily as the other PowerBook did, but instead of mounting the card on the desktop, Finder does a restart cycle and nothing else happens. I try booting from a Disk Tools floppy (thinking maybe my software was corrupt), and it asks me if I want to format the card I insert (said it was something like a 32k disk). I figured I had a bad motherboard, since the CardBus card fit, but didn't work (unlike the non-CardBus 3400 and Kanga, which won't physically accept these cards). So I try a different motherboard from my dead power board machine, and wound up with the same scenario.
Time for Google! I run a few searches, and apparently the U.S.-spec models don't support CardBus, while the 240MHz Japanese version does. After some pages praising MCE's mod, and some filled with speculation about why these machines weren't CardBus'd from the factory, I finally hit the jackpot with a page that details two procedures for enabling CardBus, depending on motherboard version. I have the one with the two yellow wires, so I simply desoldered them (I don't like clipping, in case I have to reverse the procedure), taped them up, and BAM! Insert CardBus USB card, and it mounts and is usable. No crashes, no abnormalities, nothing... except glorious CardBus support. Now I have a nice 240MHz 750-based 2400c with 112MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive. Woot! I'll put a picture or two on Flickr of the wires I'm talking about if anybody cares, since the links in that page don't seem to work anymore.
Anyways, since the addition of the yellow wires was a deliberate act during production, there should be a reason why these machines were hobbled, especially since the card cage accepts CardBus cards otherwise. Anybody care to speculate, or to perhaps provide a real clue?
Next, I buy a production U.S. model (because I don't want to travel with my other one). This one will allow CardBus cards to fit just as easily as the other PowerBook did, but instead of mounting the card on the desktop, Finder does a restart cycle and nothing else happens. I try booting from a Disk Tools floppy (thinking maybe my software was corrupt), and it asks me if I want to format the card I insert (said it was something like a 32k disk). I figured I had a bad motherboard, since the CardBus card fit, but didn't work (unlike the non-CardBus 3400 and Kanga, which won't physically accept these cards). So I try a different motherboard from my dead power board machine, and wound up with the same scenario.
Time for Google! I run a few searches, and apparently the U.S.-spec models don't support CardBus, while the 240MHz Japanese version does. After some pages praising MCE's mod, and some filled with speculation about why these machines weren't CardBus'd from the factory, I finally hit the jackpot with a page that details two procedures for enabling CardBus, depending on motherboard version. I have the one with the two yellow wires, so I simply desoldered them (I don't like clipping, in case I have to reverse the procedure), taped them up, and BAM! Insert CardBus USB card, and it mounts and is usable. No crashes, no abnormalities, nothing... except glorious CardBus support. Now I have a nice 240MHz 750-based 2400c with 112MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive. Woot! I'll put a picture or two on Flickr of the wires I'm talking about if anybody cares, since the links in that page don't seem to work anymore.
Anyways, since the addition of the yellow wires was a deliberate act during production, there should be a reason why these machines were hobbled, especially since the card cage accepts CardBus cards otherwise. Anybody care to speculate, or to perhaps provide a real clue?
It's working fine now with a MacAlly USB card and Orinoco Gold wireless card in both slots. Mine is specced to 240Mhz G3/112MB RAM (bought from YourMacStore, cheap!), 40GB HD - a beast for it's diminutive size!
