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I appear to have placed more emphasis than I meant to on the “540c” part. The goal of this project would be to replace ALL of the various PowerBook models’ easily damaged parts. For example, I have a 180c whose case was destroyed because the moron who pulled the drive Back In The Day didn’t put...

Uh, as far as I know OS X already does all that. What specifically would be different?

I have recently acquired a PowerBook 540c. As so many of us have found, the case plastics are so feeble as to not reliably stand up to disassembly of the machine, even when great care is taken. I am strongly motivated to have more durable replacements fabricated. Many threads here in the past...

I agree 1000%. One of the few areas where OS 9 is still arguably superior to OS X is in UI consistency. Even with additions like the Windowshade functionality, classic Macs seem more predictable IMO. Later versions of OS X seem far more concerned with stylistic issues than usability ones, to the...

The whole idea of “serial” versus “null-modem” cables as you describe them is a holdover from RS-232 connections as used in almost all non-classic-Mac computers. RS-232 defines connections in terms of a “data terminal” and “data set” — i.e. a computer end and a modem/printer/whatever end. All of...

I had OS 7.6.1 running on mine, but it was horribly slow even with 10 MiB RAM. I am fairly certain that 7.1 is the best OS for such an underpowered Mac—seriously, it’s a sluggish 16 MHz machine with a crippled, half-width memory bus. 7.1.x can do almost everything 7.5.x can do with the right...

A standard mini-DIN-8 serial cable is indeed all that is needed. I have done it myself on numerous occasions. The trick there, and the reason it likely didn’t work for you, is that there are two different kinds of such cables. Most of them are wired such that the “transmit” pins at each end are...

I can safely say that, as I know only enough to be dangerous, I probably do not Know What I Am Doing; I also do not have access to any such special equipment as you describe. Assuming that 0.1 V is indeed low enough to indicate the battery may have entered a state of permanent discharge, is...

Yes, that’s the major annoyance. There are system extensions to take care of the most exasperating side effect (the clock always resetting to 1904), so fixing it isn’t super critical, but it’s one of those little nagging annoyances that is hard to completely ignore, you know? (I never did get...

Hi all, I looked through the archives here for any mention of 500-series PRAM batteries (it turns out that they are actually full-on 50-mAh backup batteries, not just a feeble thing for for keeping the PRAM alive), and apart from learning that they are very unlikely to leak or to stop working...

As was mentioned briefly much earlier in the thread, these are not Etherwave units, just the plain-Jane Farallon AAUI transceivers with no special model name. I suppose all those chips could be line drivers and such. It just seemed like a surprising amount of complexity for something without, so...

These Farallon ones of mine have numerous high-pin-count microchips on the board. Are you sure they are just glorified cables? The two factoids seem incompatible.

I just made an interesting (if potentially embarrassing) discovery. Both of my dud Farallon transceivers have a teeny little slide switch recessed into one side. I’m guessing, from the relative ages of things people have posted pictures of in this thread, that it is likely a heartbeat on/off...

You can find the complete set of Enablers in the Macintosh Garden. Not going to link it because I don’t remember if all of them were free on Apple’s discontinued FTP archive.

Huh! Very interesting! The article I was reading about the internals of UTP Ethernet (I think it was on Wikipedia, was about a week ago and I forget the details) mentioned a heartbeat, but made it sound like the function is inherent to every Ethernet link (the point-to-point part, not the whole...

Short of laboriously (and dangerously, considering the fragile case plastics) opening my 540c to see what kind of hard drive it has, is there any way to tell whether it has an IDE or a SCSI hard drive? I vaguely recall that the earliest Mac IDE implementations masqueraded as SCSI to the system...

Huh. Guess I got sold a pair of duds. Charming. Oh well, lesson learnt.

That’s only half the equation, though. Unless your machines all have 10baseT on the motherboard you will need some kind of adapter to connect them to the Ethernet cables. If any of your machines use AAUI adapters, with which brands of AAUI adapter are you achieving success?

Hmm. Would be humorously, if infuriatingly, ironic if the thing is just plain broken. The LEDs claim it works, but that’s far from a guarantee.

Unlikely to be the problem, alas. Almost all of my cables are several years old and non-crossover. Please recall, switching in an Asanté unit in place of the Farallon one makes it start working.