[geeks] Anyone know of good sources of 5V DIMMs?

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Sun, Jun 18, 2006 at 10:05:52AM -0400, nate at portents.com wrote:
> 7300/7600 class machines upgraded with G3 processors from 250Mhz to
> 500Mhz.  Video cards will be Radeon 7000 32MB PCI, and hard drives are
> going to be new 9GB low profile SCSI drives.

Sounds good to me. If you can get them to run. 

> I'm aiming at 10.3 with XPostFacto.

Also sounds good.


> They won't need those, just MS Office type stuff, web, and email.  No
> multimedia stuff needed.

I run Firefox and Open Office on Wallstreets with no trouble. Don't do
email on them at all.

> That's only an openfirmware IDE driver issue, except the Rev A B&W which
> had some IDE controller chip issues.  The beige G3 Macs can take an IDE
> drive as big as 128GB, you just have to keep your OS X partition to 8GB or
> less and at the beginning of the drive.  After the OS is booted, it's own
> driver takes over and can handle partitions above 8GB just fine.

It may or may not. One of the problems is that the controler chips 
on the older machines DO have problems. Besides the B&W G3's, Tray loading
iMacs except for the last version, also have problems.

> 
> I also have PCI IDE cards which, having their own openfirmware drivers,
> don't have the 8GB limitation for booting.

That will fix that and the speed problem.


> The G3 upgrade cards won't have their caches turned on until OS X boots,
> so I don't think it will be a problem.  They have 8 DIMM slots, so they
> can take up to 1GB of RAM, and I'm still hoping to get them to 512MB per
> machine if I can do it inexpensively enough.

That may be tough. Memory at that time was expensive. Not the $40 a meg
of the mid '90s, but not cheap, so people did not buy lots of it.


> Wish they actually had something as new as a B&W.  If I'm lucky, I'll be
> piecing together a gigabit G4 from parts soon that I can donate to them,
> and that will probably be their one 'modern' machine.

Sounds good to me. 

> But I'm not too concerned about USB, as their printer is on ethernet, and
> I think I can scrounge up some multibutton ADB mice from Kensington which
> have OS X drivers (Kensington was the only company to write ADB drivers
> for OS X), though they won't have scroll wheels, so I might end up going
> the USB card route in the end.

The B&W G3 had an ADB port. Although it does work for a keyboard and mouse,
it was not supposed to. It was designed for a monitor that used ADB.
(For what I don't know).

Geoff.


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