Vintage Mac Safety

[68k User]

Hello,

I'm not a technician, so my question could be silly for expert people: leaving a vintage mac, a Mac SE/30 in my case, turned on for hours, for example during nights, is it safe or it can catch fire? From an electric point of view, safety switch of house electrical plan should prevent this, isn't it? And Mac SE/30 has some safeguard about this problem?

Thank you.

 

[IlikeTech]

Unless it has some major problem, I would highly doubt it.  It is in fact, UL listed, and the only part really likely to catch fire is the power supply, which should have been recapped.  All voltages coming out of the power supply are low.

 

[falen5]

dont know why you would want to leave a mac plugged in and turned on over night but I wouldnt.

All my vintage machines get plugged out when its time for the zzzzz's

if your house catched fire i dont think the warranty would be worth much

plug em all out man

 

[68k User]

Thank you for your replies.

About the reason of my request, I saw that uncompress some big .sit archives can take quite a long time and so I was wondering whether or not to leave the mac turned on during the night to complete, for example, those kind of operations.

Moreover I was wondering if I can use my Mac SE/30 as a little web server, just for amusement.

PS: my SE/30 has the logic board recapped, but not the analog one... I didn't know that also AB was critical for capacitors.

 

[fri0701]

Also, safety aside, keep in mind that leaving a CRT on for long hours showing the same screen is never a good idea for the health of the machine.

 

[68k User]

I agree with you, but if I leaved the mac turned on during nights or as a server, I would turn off the screen and this should prevent damages to it (I think...).

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Hi 68k User.

Personally, I wouldn't leave it on for the night. A/ You never know what could happen and B/ Unless you turn the brightness knob way down, you'll definitely  burn the phosphor.

You mentioned unstuffing big files (May I ask how big are those files?). If they're really really big (more than 80mb), then my recommendation is to do that on a faster Mac. The Unarchiver (App Store) does the job quite well. You could also install Stuffit on a Basilisk/Sheepshaver Virtual Machine... But then you'll have to figure out a way to transfer those files to the SE/30. I have a SCSI2SD and it makes handling large files a lot easier.

Unstuffing 20-30mb files on an SE/30 shouldn't take that long anyway. Turn on your Mac when you get up in the morning, start the process, turn on the coffee machine, etc etc and it should be ready before you leave the house.

 

[68k User]

Thank you BadGoldEagle for your advise.

Yesterday I tried to uncompress 4Mb .sit file (Excel 4 from Macintosh Garden, if I remember correctly) and after 20 minutes not even the progress bar was appeared. I want to install Code Warrior that I saw is more than 100Mb, so my initial question...

I have downloaded Unarchiver in the past, but if I decompress .sit files from modern OS X, I think I should loose the resource fork of macintosh files: I use Filezilla to transfer from OS X to SE/30 (with NetPresenz) unmodified image or .sit files downloaded from Internet.

I've also a PB 5300, but transferring files through AppleTalk or Ethernet is very slow and I don't know if it's quicker to uncompress files with PB and then transfer the uncompressed files to SE/30 or to transfer compressed files to SE/30 and then uncompress them with this machine.

I never tried to connect my SE/30 with Basilisk II that sometimes I use, but the problem of low transfer rate to/from Mac SE/30 should still remain.

About SCSI2SD, I'm going to buy it, but I don't have it at the moment.

 

[Bolle]

You can uncompress the files in OSX, then binhex them in OSX and they will keep their resource forks when transmitting them via FTP.

Opening binhex is way faster on an old Mac than decompressing sit archives.

 

[Scott Baret]

My philosophy is that is safe to leave them on if and only if they have had EVERYTHING recapped.

By everything, I mean everything. I once had a capacitor blow on a IIci cache card...which prompted me to re-cap an Apple IIe card for my LC before I put it to use.

Thankfully, these computers are easy enough to switch off (unless, of course, you have a LaserWriter 4/600 PS, which has no power switch).

Here's one other factor: even if the computer itself is safe with new capacitors, these things are major energy hogs when compared to newer machines. Do you really want your electric bill to rise unnecessarily?