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Just pulled the trigger on an 840AV on ebay
- Thread starter Quadraman
- Start date
The 840AV got here today and a couple of little disappointments to report. The blank faceplate over the hard drive bay was off when it arrived and the whole thing wasn't packed very well so the faceplate (the small, drive cover one, not the larger faceplate) got smashed to bits during shipping. I also shook it when it arrived and heard a cascade of small, hard objects inside. Looking at the back, one of the slot covers was missing so I figured someone opened it up at some point to remove an add in card and we all know what it's like getting inside these things. I opened it up and dumped out all the little plastic shards and it looks like they are from the plastic seperators that go in between the nubus cards along the back edge of the case to keep them standing upright. Grrr. I booted it up and after a few seconds got a bomb. I booted with extensions off and that worked but something was obviously corrupt. Once I got to the desktop, I tried to pull down About this Mac or whatever it is on System 7,8, and the pull down menu was blank and the desktop froze. The mouse pointer still moved, it just couldn't click anything. Reboot. Tried again with extensions disabled, reached desktop, tried a different pull down and that one was also blank and froze the desktop. I never was able to find out what system was installed on that drive. Now I had to go find my MacOS 7.6 install disc, which happened to still be in the CD drive of one of my other Quadras so it took a little time for me to remember where it was. Put the CD in, booted holding C, clicked on installer and there wasn't enough hard drive space to do an install. No joy. I usually try to overwrite the existing system before I resort to a destructive installation to save any usable software that may be on the drive so I found a bunch of crap on the drive that I knew that I wouldn't use (the Quadra had apparently belonged to a law firm at some point and had tons of lawyer centric garbage on it) so after I deleted all that crap (and recovered about 165megs!) I managed to get 7.6 onto the hard drive and it works ok now. The seller told me it had 8megs RAM but it turns out to have 32megs and a 230meg hard drive. I haven't tried the ethernet (that arrived today as well) or video cards yet. I was too frustrated from the damage, poor packaging, having to delete hundreds of files and doing an OS install to do anything else. One good thing was there was a tray load CD ROM drive in the top bay. Every picture of an 840AV I have ever seen clearly shows a caddy loader. I usually replace the caddy ladders whenever I find them so that saved me at least one step in the upgrade process. I'll be trying the cards tomorrow and hopefully that will all go smoothly.
That's disappointing after all that - my 840AV came in a similar state (although it cost ~ $30 AUD some time ago), like yours complete with rattling inside and pieces falling out inside the case. The long power switch smashed off the motherboard's power switch, and the faceplates too were coming off. Ended up having to cannibalise an 8500 case to merge the parts into one good case.
They seem be to fragile machines both inside and out - having fragile plastic, and requiring me to replace al the motherboard caps to be reliable once more. Some of the caps were leaking so badly (worse than any Mac I'd come across), I wasn't sure if I'd need a whole new board.
They seem be to fragile machines both inside and out - having fragile plastic, and requiring me to replace al the motherboard caps to be reliable once more. Some of the caps were leaking so badly (worse than any Mac I'd come across), I wasn't sure if I'd need a whole new board.
What really has me curious is why a law firm would have a Quadra 840AV. It seems to me that there are a variety of lesser Quadras that could do what they need a computer for that would cost a lot less. I know the law firm bought it new because the earliest files I found on the hard drive were dated from 1993 when the 840AV was released. The specialized AV equipment in the 840AV wouldn't be of much use in that sort of environment. It seemed to be primarily used as an automated mailing server of some kind and had some letter writing and publishing templates and some spreadsheet files. Nothing that would actually require an 840AV. A Quadra 610 could have easily handled everything I found installed on the hard drive.
840av plastics are typically brittle these days, unfortunately — very like the 9500's also.
