G4 Quicksilver successful rescue

[phunguss]

Stopped by Free Geek Minneapolis last week and found this Quicksilver $10 project. Labeled "Won't boot to any external media, For parts / project HDD, RAM removed $10"

I can't say no, so I took it home. I threw in a single 256MB DIMM and a mechanical hard drive from another old G4 and powered it on. Data plate on back:

It gave me a chime, then a warning that a CPU failed, and another warning about another failure... then it froze. I suspect it was an upgraded dual CPU from the single 733MHz listed on the label. Ok, I have never seen a cooler like this. Obviously home brew.

And a dual 800Mhz was revealed.

Cooler comparison

and another

I have a spare 867MHz from my other QS when I upgraded it to dual 1GHz, so I installed that single CPU and the correct cooler.

Then I wiggled a wire and it powered off. Oops. This one has a zip drive and I did not see a power cable going to the zip drive... but the plug was installed. Strange... so maybe the wires were yanked out and somehow shorted when I wiggled them.

I removed the PSU, and will find some spare wires and rebuild the 4 power cables for the drives and then reinstall everything.

Very dusty, so the tear down is useful.

 

[jeffburg]

My very first Mac was that exact same model (without the Zip drive). If I remember correctly the 733MHz model of quicksilver was an education only model. Because I was in high school at the time, I was able to buy it. It was bare bones but it was a Mac and it was beautiful. It came with Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.0 preinstalled, but Mac OS 9 was still the default boot OS. I had no interest in 9, I only switched to Mac to get Mac OS X. Luckily it came with a "drop in" 10.1 upgrade disc. So I promptly installed 10.1 and never looked back. Thanks for preserving this one. What a nice machine!

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Very nice The same exact 733 education QS sans zip was my first PowerPC mac as well. I guess technically that was actually an imacg3 but that was really my wifes, not mine. Anyhow, I have acquired a few extra $10 Quicksilver projects sitting around that I rescued from CL. I need to do something with them (well one has a dead PSU so I need to recap that one first I guess) - just no time right now to do so.

Anyhow, this reminds me, I need to rotate in my QS and use it for a while - still is my favorite PPC mac I have.

I wonder if the daughter card is toast or if the mac was complaining because the homebrew heatsink wasnt doing the job and you have a nice dual cpu card there.