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| Messages - Deckard | |
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1
Hardware / PowerBook 1400 Compact Flash via PCMCIA?
July 04, 2010, 12:12 |
The Sonnet Crescendo/PB G3 is the only CPU upgrade I've found so far that explicitly list support for the PowerBook 1400. There's a few other Sonnet Crescendo cards on Ebay and elsewhere (going for less than $100) that the sellers have claimed will work the 1400, but I'm skeptical. And the Crescendo/PB G3 elsewhere lists for around $250-300. Unless the 1400 is really easy to upgrade, I'd be nervous about opening it up and doing that, as I've never done that on a laptop. It's the same thing with laptop hard drives. But if the 1400 isn't like the G3/G4 PowerBooks (I replaced the hard drive in a clamshell iBook once, having to take apart the entire case, and I would never do it again), then I might take a chance, as well as add in another 16MB RAM to max it out. The Sonnet website claims that upgrading the CPU is rather straightforward (listed as out of stock, of course.) |
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Hardware / PowerBook 1400 Compact Flash via PCMCIA?
July 03, 2010, 15:02 |
Thanks very much for the very detailed advice. Much appreciated! Basically, any standard PCMCIA Compact Flash adapter will work? If I can get a 4 or 8GB Flash card to work with this system, that would be incredible. Do you need any special drivers or software to get the Flash adapter and card to work, or this feature is built directly in OS 7.6? That's very interesting you have WiFi working on a 1400. I will definitely look into WavLan. Thanks for letting me know. My system has 48MB RAM and I considered upgrading it since it only needs another 16MB as well as upgrading the CPU to a G3, but it looks like it would be very expensive. I believe the compatible upgrade would be one of the NuBus G3 cards and I've been searching on the Web and finding some for sale around the $200-400 range. That's way too much money. For a 117mhz PPC, it actually runs very fast on 7.6.1. It takes about a minute to boot and get to the Finder and the only applications which do get bogged down a bit are the bloatware like IE 5.1.7 and Netscape. Word 5.1 runs at a blazing speed. If the CPU upgrade wasn't that expensive, I'd do it, but for the same price I could buy a G3 PowerBook or iBook with maxed out RAM and a decent hard drive. I actually did call Sonnet directly to inquire whether they had any remaining stock of G3 upgrades but the person on the phone was extremely rude and abrupt and told me, I kid you not, "Get a life and stop being cheap. Just get a new computer!" and then hung up. Pretty sad. |
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Hardware / PowerBook 1400 Compact Flash via PCMCIA?
July 03, 2010, 10:53 |
I've been reading a lot about replacing the internal hard drive in a PB 1400 with a Compact Flash card, but considering the fact that my 1400 is the original 117mhz model with no L2 cache, I don't really want to bother tinkering with it. It's also in pristine condition since it's virtually been unused, so I don't want to risk any damage. But considering the excellent keyboard and the ability to run Word 5.1 once again (!), I've been finding myself doing virtually all my writing on it rather than on my sleek, fancy MacBook Pro. The hard drive is a mere 750MB, however, and while that's more than enough for word processing, I've found that System 7.6.1 can also run Internet Explorer 5.1.7 and a bunch of other applications that supposedly are only for OS 8 and 9, and it runs them rather smoothly, all things considered. It plays MP3s well enough that I can work with Word and listen to music at the same time. And the ethernet works great, so no complaints there. So, it'd definitely be nice to have some extra drive space. I don't know a lot about Compact Flash cards, but on the Low End Mac article about this topic, it's mentioned that some PowerBooks are able to utilize Flash cards via the PCMCIA card slot? Is this possible with the 1400 and if so, how would I go about doing this? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Also, my 1400 had been upgraded with OS 8.6. I found this to be intolerably slow, so I decided to erase the hard drive and do a fresh install of 7.6. However, after erasing the hard drive, the system froze (using a 7.6 CD) and refused to boot the 7.6 CD again, nor any other System CD, all of them retail versions (not system specific.) A few times it did boot the CD, but didn't get very far and would freeze up or crash. The only solution I came up with was to first copy the System folder from the Disk Tools image found at this site to the HD via floppy and then manually copy System 7.6 files from an old PowerBook Duo 2300 using self-extracting StuffIt files, again using floppies since the Disk Tools didn't seem to be compatible with the CD-ROM driver in the Extensions folder. Tedious, to say the least, but it worked. Interestingly, after doing all that, the computer was now able to boot from CD without any issues. Very strange, as I've never encountered this problem before. Any ideas on what that might be all about? |
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