What did you do to you computer today?

[Volvo242GT]

Haven't seen a thread, like the ones over at the other forum, so figured I might as well get it rolling. About 30 minutes ago, decided to see if I could get my MacBook back up to 12GB RAM. A few days ago, I made the mistake of letting my phone drop onto the palmrest between the keyboard and the trackpad. Immediately, the computer froze with garbage on the screen, and three tones being played every five seconds. Shut it down. Tried booting again. Dark screen, same tones. Googled it, and realized that it was a RAM problem. Pulled the 4GB stick. Problem remained. Pulled the 8GB stick, and reinstalled the 4GB stick. Success. Back up and running, but with only 4GB of RAM. Reached out to a friend who had a spare 8GB stick. Picked it up from him yesterday. Finally got around to it this evening. Installed his stick, problem reappeared. On a whim, I decided to pull the 4GB stick, and install his 8GB stick alone. Computer booted. Shut it down, and figured, "heck, let's see what happens if I reinstall the other 8GB stick that I pulled originally." Put that one in. Computer booted up without problems. So, I'm now back to a full 16GB of RAM, like what the computer had before I picked up the problem child mid-2012 MBP last summer.

 

[PentaxEnthusiast]

I've been fighting in vain to reinstall either XP or 98SE on my ThinkPad 770. The optical drive is fighting me every step of the way after working perfectly a few months back. Not sure what's changed.

The drive itself is a Toshiba SD-C2002, which was used in a broad range of laptops back in the 90s. Preliminary research has shown very little mentions of failure of this drive.

I've ordered a 44-pin to 40-pin adapter so I can use my Compaq to install 98SE on the hard drive. I'd really like to solve the optical drive issue, however.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Installed some games (UT & Q3A) & some of my fav productivity apps (Toast9, iwork08 & omigraffle5) to my a1047 PCI PowerMac G5 and connected a 1T external and pointed TimeMachine to it … still backing up lol. This has turned out to be a very fun Mac to build up and those games absolutely slay on that machine. Additionally, I’m very excited about Powerfox for PPC Leopard/Sorbet. I’ve been using it on all of my Early Intel Macs that still boot to some flavor of legacy macOS for quite some time, so to now have a modern uxp browser for PowerPC is a pretty fantastic prospect for their future.

My 3.5” card reader & 5.25” temperature readout & ATX fan control module came in yesterday so I started installing those into my Linux/win10 tower this evening when my 2y/o came into my office fussy because he wanted to go to sleep. He won’t sleep without Dad and one can easily imagine the shenanigans a fussy 2y/o can get into quickly in ones man cave full of awesome man-cavey things, so that job will have to wait until another day.

Very excited as my Handspring Visor came in too but that also will have to wait for another day.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I picked up a fan controller and temperature module for a 5.25” bay in my tower off amazon and installed it.

The unit looked great unpowered and had what I needed in sensors and fan controls but the lcd was too bright lol when on. Believe it or not there were multiple time and alarm settings but no brightness setting or lcd off option, so your vision gets assaulted by a lightsaber as soon as you power on your box. That and if you’re looking at it at any angle that is not straight on, it has really bad color bleed and is difficult to read. I keep this box under my desk on a trolly so that was no good.

So I packed it up and returned it stating those issues. The next option is x3 pricier so no fan/temp module for me haha.

The $7 card reader went in without an issue and accepts all the aging obsoleted Sony memory sticks I have around for my old Sony cameras.

1 win
1 loss

It gave me an opportunity to clean the inside of my case I guess. It was getting pretty dusty in there.

 

[PentaxEnthusiast]

After discovering yesterday that the 770s hard drive appears to be dead as well, I've given up on doing anything with it for the time being. Makes me a little sad that things have given up the ghost, but it's a 28 year old machine with all original bits, so I guess it's to be expected.

Beyond that, I've just been playing Diablo II on the G3.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Today I installed a long, stereo 3.5mm to r/l rca cable from my PmG5 to my stereo amplifier to play music from my NAS. I also fixed a cd carousel player which holds 51 cds so I’ve been filling up a spreadsheet of which album is in what slot. Otherwise I will totally forget what’s what thus the entire thing will be a mystery. I also installed a few bobs n bits in my w10/Linux box - a few usb3 leads from the back to the front for easy access as well as a usb2 controller splitter so both the front facing case I/o as well as my front facing card reader are both functional.

Lastly I picked up an rca v/r/l to vga adapter in the hopes that I could connect my c64 to a lcd monitor but unfortunately that did not produce a picture.

 

[Volvo242GT]

Sounds like you guys have been busy...

@PentaxEnthusiast Sounds like it might be time to find an SD or CF adapter that can plug into the IDE cable inside the machine. That would at least let you use an "SSD" solution on it.

Spent some time transferring documents and music to my old A1186's hard drive, in preparation for installing in the A1289 Mac Pro I'm picking up today. Also spent some time mucking around with the G4 a couple days ago. Wanted to see if the hard drives I'd pulled out of the Beige G3 MT I parted out were functional. Alas, no. But, I now have a second SCSI card in the G4. Also replaced the PRAM battery that was an original-looking Saft with an FDK LiMn version, so I don't have to worry about what happened to the Beige G3, a Centris 650 that I picked up in 2023, and an SE/30 that I owned back in 2012. Namely the usual battery bomb issue.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Today I installed a long, stereo 3.5mm to r/l rca cable from my PmG5 to my stereo amplifier to play music from my NAS. I also fixed a cd carousel player which holds 51 cds so I’ve been filling up a spreadsheet of which album is in what slot. Otherwise I will totally forget what’s what thus the entire thing will be a mystery. I also installed a few bobs n bits in my w10/Linux box - a few usb3 leads from the back to the front for easy access as well as a usb2 controller splitter so both the front facing case I/o as well as my front facing card reader are both functional.

Lastly I picked up an rca v/r/l to vga adapter in the hopes that I could connect my c64 to a lcd monitor but unfortunately that did not produce a picture.

Finished filling up the carousel and spread sheet. As I add CDs, if any of them are missing from my music library on my NAS, I take the time to rip the CD to my NAS before adding it to the carousel. Some of these CDs are old TOTC burns themselves, so take quite a while to capture a quality duplicate and is a great reminder to search ebay for the real thing.

Anyways, almost done.

 

[Volvo242GT]

Got the Mac Pro home and set up. Looks like it needs an Airport Extreme wi-fi card installed on the logic board, since there's no ability to connect to my wi-fi network, unless I use the TP-Link dongle that I've used with my G4.

Also got an mid-2010 A1278 MBP with the Mac Pro, which I may outfit with a larger drive, then install a partition with 10.6.8 on it. Reason being is that I can then install my copy of Photoshop CS2 on it and not have to deactivate one of the two allowed installs of CS4 on my other Intel Macs. The A1278 also is a smaller machine, which works better for me when I'm on a trip and want to travel light. I can do image editing under Snow Leopard, then reboot in High Sierra, and upload photos to the internet, etc. If I'm going to be away more than a couple days or so, I'll then carry the A1286, since it's a more powerful machine and has everything I usually use installed on it. On that computer, got it booted up, then deleted the previous owner's user account after adding mine with my Apple ID. Do need to source a good battery for it, so I can use it untethered and without having all my settings get reset when I unplug it from the wall.

 

[Arbystpossum]

I was looking inside of my G3 iMac, looking to see if there was a place to put a fan. Ideally it'd be up top where the monitor is, blowing air up and out of the case, but I'm afraid of magnetic stuff getting with the tube, because it's right there. The bottom isn't a great idea because there's no clear channel for air to move. I don't like the amount of heat that builds up in these old consumer Macs. Moreso, heat management in old Macs AND PCs was absolutely terrible, and I try to modify where I can to make my machines run cooler. I've done some good things with all of my machines, but the G3 and G4 iMacs are definitely the Final Boss of cooling. There's no space in these things and the designs make them hard to make easy air flow.