[rescue] Quadra 650 - Newb questions/parts seeking

[Chad McAuley]

Howdy folks.  There's a Quadra 650 (along with a LaserWriter II and a
Macintosh 16" Color Display) here at work that's been doing nothing
but occupying desk space for ages[0].  To save it the cruel fate of
going off for recycling (or getting tossed in the dumpster), I'm going
to take it home and play with it.  However, I'm very much a newb when
it comes to all things Macintosh, especially the older systems, so I
have some questions.

1) This particular machine has no CD-ROM drive.  From what I can tell
a 2x drive came standard on these machines, so it'd be safe to assume
the original died and was pulled, right? Either way, do I need a
specific Apple branded CD-ROM to go in here, or will any 50-pin SCSI
drive work?

2) It currently has System 7.1 on it.  In my research I noticed that
this machine will run up to System 8.1, and that System 7.5.3 is
freely available from Apple.  Two questions: First, what the hell do I
do with these disk images?  The readme says to download them to the HD
and then click on the first part to open the image.  Can I just
upgrade from there, or do I need to them get them on other media
(i.e., floppy) in order to install?  Secondly, should I bother trying
to run System 8.1 on here, or would I be better off sticking with
7.5.x?

3) It currently has the original 250MB HD in it.  What's the biggest
drive I can put in this?  I'm not sure what I'll end up using it for
yet, but I'd like to get a bigger HD in there.  And again, do I need
an Apple branded drive, or will anything work?

4) I found some 72-pin memory hiding here in a box at work, and was
able to take it from the 8MB on board up to 80MB.  It sees it all
fine, and once I discovered I had to enable 32-bit addressing it was
even available to programs.  However, that setting isn't sticking, so
I have to keep turning it back on.  Is this a System 7.1 thing, or
might I have a dead battery or something on my hands?


Now, a few things I'm looking for, in order of preference.

- either an AAUI-15 to RJ45 transceiver or a nubus ethernet card with
a RJ45 jack so I can hook  the Quadra up to my network
- a CD-ROM
- either the VRAM upgrade chips or a nubus video card that will allow
me to run higher color depths
- 3 more 32MB sticks of RAM so I can max this guy out
- a larger HD


If anyone has any of this stuff they'd be willing to part with, or can
at least point me in the direction of somewhere I could pick some of
these things up for cheap I'd appreciate it.