PowerBook 520c with 603e Upgrade Questions

[Schafeman]

Hi. I picked up a nice 520c for $15 off eBay.  It wasn't tested, but after I got it yesterday I hooked it up to my 520 power adapter and powered it up.  It had no HDD, so I swapped in my drive from my 520.  I found out it in fact has a 117mhz PowerPC upgrade (which is awesome), however it's slow as molasses.  I'm pretty sure it needs some sort of extension to get it working properly, however when I downloaded what I thought was needed (I think this is a NewerTech upgrade), it doesn't even load the extension or control panel.  It has MacOS 8.1 installed.  I also think I infected it with some virus when I was installing a bunch of stuff last night, and its replicating all of the desktop icons 200 times so far and trying to enable file sharing on its own.  Wonderful...

 

[rsolberg]

The PowerBook 500 series with PPC upgrade card was an officially supported configuration by Apple, so all support required should be built into Mac OS 8.1 already. If you had the 183MHz Newer Tech card with 128KB cache, then you'd probably need the NuPower Cache software, but otherwise, I think you're fine. In case I'm wronh, here's Newer Tech's legacy download page: http://www.newertech.com/tech_support/support_legacy.php

You could download the NuPower System Update and check its readme for system software versions that require it.

Beyond that, you might just be experiencing Mac OS 8.1 doing a bunch of 68k emulation on a cacheless 603e. I'd do a clean install of the Mac OS, to make sure it's installing PPC versions of as much of the included software as possible. "Install system software for any Mac" might be a good idea.

 

[Schafeman]

It's so slow, that my other 520 with the factory 68040 is light-years faster. Something isn't right, but I'm not sure what yet.

 

[techknight]

As mentioned before, a cache-less PPC emulates 68K MUCH slower than a native 68K. So you need an OS with PPC code. Thats really the only way. That, and the buss is hobbled much in the same way as a 52XX and a 5300 powerbook. So, it runs slow on top of emulating 68K slow. 

 

[Schafeman]

Interesting.. I'll have to get around to eventually re-installing 8.1 as a universal system to see if that helps.