Time to open up the ol' mail bag again and attend to some questions
and comments.
Umax C500 603e/200
From Joseph C. Brown
Hi,
I'm Joe Brown, a Mac user in Oak Ridge.
Know of any sites on the web which have good troubleshooting advice
for a Umax clone?
I've got a wheezing & groaning Mac clone, a Umax C500 603e/200 that really needs a pro
to yank all the data off the whopping 2 gig HD and save it for me. I've
already proved that I'm inept enough to not risk doing that.
Any help would be appreciated!
Joe Brown
Hi Joe,
You should be able to download your data onto a backup
medium yourself. Methodology depends on what that medium would be. You
could transfer the files to another computer's hard drive over Ethernet
or some other network (if your machine supports Ethernet); hook up an
external SCSI hard drive (or a PowerBook in SCSI Disk Mode); or use a
Jaz or Zip or other removable media drive, a CD burner, or a tape
backup drive.
Another method would be to remove the hard drive from
the Umax, install it in another computer as a second drive, and
transfer the files to that machine's hard drive, but you probably
wouldn't want to attempt that yourself.
I can't think of any specific C500 troubleshooting
sites offhand.
Good luck,
Charles
Editor's note: Your best bet it probably the SuperMacs email list, which has
hundreds of experienced SuperMac owners. dk
Re: Umax C500 603e/200
From Joseph C. Brown
Greetings,
It's nice to know that I'm not the only person who's owned one of
these computers! My precise problem is: upon startup, the screen will
show the cursor, and then "freeze" right there.
No amount of praying, cursing, or arcane button-combination-pushing
will get it past that point. I've tried booting from the Install CD,
and from Norton's Utilities, to no avail. I wish I could say that I had
done something stupid to the machine to have warranted this behavior,
but that's not the case.
My current plan is to replace the motherboard's battery, and if that
doesn't help, then haul it to the one person I know in the
Knoxville area that is willing to tackle working on a Mac Clone. At
this point, I'll be happy to salvage the data from the hard drive; none
of it is irreplaceable, I'd just rather not have to go through the
process of replacing it!
This Umax clone is "my" machine; my wife's is a Compaq PC of recent
vintage. What irks me the most about this whole affair is fact that I
could have transferred all of the data from my Mac to her PC
back in January of this year; we had both machines on a 'home-network',
both of them using Ethernet cards, and connected via a router to a
cable modem. Just send my various text documents as mail attachments,
or HTML. All the jpegs as, er, jpegs. Alas, I didn't think of that at
the time!
I appreciate your response - thanks!
Joe Brown
Upgrading StarMax 3000/160 DT
From Ride
Hi,
I want to know if I can add an internal Zip Drive to the Motorola StarMax 3000/160 DT?
I see an extra drive cable in there and what appears to be an extra
3.5" bay on top of the floppy drive.
I took out the front bezel and the inside metal piece, so it really
does appear to be an extra bay, and the floppy is on the bottom of a
supporter, so it looks like an internal Zip Drive can just sit on top
of the floppy in the space.
If yes, can you also tell me what kind of Zip Drive to look for? Is
it just called an internal IDE/ATAPI Zip Drive? I'm a little confused
on the actual kind to get if it will go in there.
Thanks
Hi,
An internal IDE/ATAPI Zip Drive should work fine in
your StarMax in one of the bays, of which it seems you have an empty
one.
Just hook up the ATA cable and a power cable and you
should be zipping nicely.
Charles
Ethernet card in StarMax 3000?
From Kevin Turcotte
Mr. Moore:
I would like to get high speed Internet service and I was hoping you
could tell me whether or not my StarMax 3000
MT has an ethernet card? (I didn't see anything in the system
profiler, and a Sherlock search for the word "ethernet" produced a
system extension called "Apple Ethernet CS 11".) If I have to buy and
install one, do certain kinds of ethernet cards work better with
StarMax computers?
Isn't it unusual that a technical support guy for the Sympatico High
Speed Access would say that Sympatico does not offer support when
StarMax is involved. (According to him, any Mac or Mac clone built in
the last ten years should already have an ethernet card)
If you can answer any of these questions or direct me to another Web
site where I could pick up more info, it would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Kevin Turcotte
Hi Kevin,
Your StarMax 3000 has PCI slots, so you should not
have a problem installing an Ethernet card. Check with your local
computer reseller or an online reseller and ask for a PCI Ethernet card
that supports Macs.
The Sympatico guy is misinformed. There are many less
than ten year old Macs that have no built-in ethernet support (my 1993
LC 520 and 1996 PowerBook 5300 are two specific cases in
point).
I have found that with ISP tech support people, a bit
of knowledge about Macs (which is all you can reasonably hope for -
abject ignorance is the norm) can be a dangerous thing. All Macs since
the PowerBook G3 and iMac (both introduced in 1998) have had on board
ethernet.
Charles
Editor's note: Several clones did not include ethernet, the Motorola
StarMax line and the SuperMac C500 and C600 among them. dk
Motorola StarMax RAM and Cache
From Andrew Hobson
Hello,
May I ask you some advice for some L2 cache RAM?
I have a Motorola StarMax 3000/180
desktop computer with 256K L2 cache. I want to buy 512K L2 cache. I
have absolutely no idea of the specifications of the RAM module I must
buy.
Do you know exactly what RAM module I need and where I may find some
online?
I also want to buy 4 MB of SGRAM for the Motorola; do you know
where I may find some?
Thanks a lot.
Andrew Hobson
Hi Andrew,
Other World
Computing has 3.3 volt EDO 168 pin DRAM for StarMax computers.
The L2 cache, I don't know.
Charles
WordPerfect 3.5 download
From David Porter
I recently went on a search of the fabled Corel free WordPerfect
download without success. Is it no longer available? Please let me know
if it is out there somewhere.
Thanks,
David Porter
Hi David,
Try <http://db.tt/y4yrQ0M>.
Charles
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