Power Macintosh 5500/250

[notcrazy_iminsane]

Turns out one of the guys in my technical college class used to go to schools and take out old computers to send parts to recyclers. I brought in my LC 575 for some cleaning and formatting, maybe a memory expansion if I was lucky and we got to talking. Turns out he's got quite a few Macs in storage, saying that he always put them to the side when he got ahold of them. He suggested he should bring one in so we could work on it. Thinking it was another LC 5xx, turns out he brought in a Power Macintosh 5500/250 He says I can do whatever I want with it.

All it needed was a bit of dusting, a power cable, keyboard, and mouse, and it was good to go. I think it'll be fun to work with my first Power PC Mac. I realized that it runs a little slower than my LC 575, despite having much more built in RAM.

And minor question, which forum would I post in if I had a question about this Mac? PCI or NuBus? :O I wanna say PCI, but I'm not quite sure...

 

[beachycove]

Check the System Profiler to confirm that you do indeed have a 250MHz 603ev, which is what you should have in a 5500/250. Maybe somebody stuck in a "downgrade" like a 5200 logic board (ugh!). If it's a 603ev, it really shouldn't be slow, unless there are problems with the System software (a fresh System re-installation could cure that) or unless it is running too high a System on too low a memory complement.

The machine should be a lot faster than an LC575, but it can also be made to run more slowly. In 7.6.1 and with, say, 64MB RAM, 256k cache and a modern IDE drive, it'll run like lightning. Anything up to 8.6 will be good, in fact, but having 128MB RAM would be better in OS8.x. After that, you are starting to flog a dead horse, in my view.

 

[IIfx]

I have a 5500/250, its a great machine.

Only problem with it is how the CRT goes on a blue color tint at random

 

[coius]

You got a bad connection on the harness probably. I dunno if I would go about touching up the solder joints, but I would try re-adjusting the thing that fits on the end of the tube and see if that works, failing that, touch up the solder joints on the card the wires go to

 

[notcrazy_iminsane]

Check the System Profiler to confirm that you do indeed have a 250MHz 603ev, which is what you should have in a 5500/250. Maybe somebody stuck in a "downgrade" like a 5200 logic board (ugh!). If it's a 603ev, it really shouldn't be slow, unless there are problems with the System software (a fresh System re-installation could cure that) or unless it is running too high a System on too low a memory complement.
The machine should be a lot faster than an LC575, but it can also be made to run more slowly. In 7.6.1 and with, say, 64MB RAM, 256k cache and a modern IDE drive, it'll run like lightning. Anything up to 8.6 will be good, in fact, but having 128MB RAM would be better in OS8.x. After that, you are starting to flog a dead horse, in my view.

I loaded the System Profiler and it said:

Processor: PowerPC 603e @ 120MHz

It's my luck that a school bought something that says it's one thing, but turns out to be another

I also formatted the drive and did a clean install of OS 8.0 and updated to 8.1 since that's the highest I can go right now. It starts up a bit faster than it did before, but I noticed that sometimes it will take a long time to load folders whenever I need to go to the Control Panel to tweak some things or load up my Apple Legacy disks for software :-/

 

[IIfx]

Processor: PowerPC 603e @ 120MHz

Sounds like a 53xx. (Which is a clockboosted 52xx with a less glitchy ROM)