Right now, I'm pretty concerned about how to crack
open the box
without breaking
it, so I can inspect the hard disk to see what it is, physically.
Does anybody
have a recipe for doing that?
Most Mac's, other than the earlier compact ones, are pretty
easy to open. Some don't even have screws holding the case lid on,
just pull tabs at the back of the lid. Others, such as the II
series, have little tabs that must be pushed in while lifting on the
lid.
Moreover, I imagine I'll use one of the
considerably larger IDE types I've set
aside from PC use to replace the drives now in the machines. It's safe to
assume, however, that NOT any IDE drive will work, since Apple Computers, Inc.
didn't like folks buying hardware at a resonable price from someone
else rather
than allowing Apple to gouge them. (part of the MAC culture, I
guess) I note,
also, that the CDROM is SCSI. That being the case, I'd like to see whether
there's room for a SCSI HDD in the box. There certainly is room in the system
(logically). That would work even better, since I have lots of extra SCSI
drives. Have any of you MAC gurus got experience with replacing MAC
IDE drives?
The problems with using hard disks other than those provided
by Apple is pretty much limited to SCSI drives. I've never had a
problem with popping a 3rd party IDE drive into one. Unfortunately,
this also applies to SCSI CD-ROM's, though there are ways around that
for using 3rd party CD's as well. If your 630 already has an
internal CD-ROM it is likely to be an Apple drive anyway, so you
wouldn't have to worry about this. I'd personally stick with the IDE
hard disks so as to avoid the inability of formatting 3rd party SCSI
drives.
It looks as though the drives in the boxes are 250 MB
or so, which might be
adequate for some things, but I doubt it would be adequate for internet
activity.
Depends on what you're going to use. Netscape 3 is pretty
much as high as I'd go on that old of a machine, though versions up
to about 4.08 are usable on non-PPC Mac's. For light use, using
System 7.5.5 (which is available freely on the 'net), 250 MB isn't
bad. System 7.5.5, as has already been pointed out, is less RAM
hungry than 8.1 and it also takes up less disk space. That's what
I'd stick with on a 68k Mac.
Jeff
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