No offense, but I have no plan to become "MAC-Literate" beyond the point of
ensuring the basic health of these two computers before I give them away to some
poor, unsuspecting person who has access to MAC help and less such access to
competent PC help. Since one of the people to whom I'm planning to give one of
these is a single woman who volunteers at the women's shelter where I have been
a volunteer for about a decade, I don't want her to be tying up my phone, or,
worse, getting the wrong impression about my intentions, as she also works at
the school where my boys went a few years back, which is the first place I met
her. Though it's no secret I'm not married, I've already got all the women I
need, plus about 10% (exactly one).
I do want to be able to give these boxes to someone, with the confidence that
they'll not be having unnecessary problems because I've not ferreted out some
problems, though, so I'll consider your advice. If I put new drives in them,
they'll be freshly formatted and the OS install will be new and fresh.
While it's a generous offer, I'll try to get by with the CD's I've got on
hand
for now, as those are accompanied with the registrations, documentation that
comes with these boxes, etc, and I'd like everything at least to appear to be on
the up-and-up, copyright-law-wise. Whereas I may sometimes play things
fast-and-loose with "borrowed" software, etc, I'd prefer not to promulgate
those
attitudes and practices into the new-user community where they might be seen
differently than I see them.
What I suspect is that there's a syncronization error between the installed OS
and the OS on the CD. That would have come about by my own hand, so I'll
consider the consequences.
BTW, what does the "Backup" function do? It seems to want to copy things to
floppies, but can it also copy things to an external SCSI drive? How about to a
SCSI tape?
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris" <mythtech(a)Mac.com>
To: "Classic Computers" <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2001 9:35 PM
Subject: Re: OT: paging MAC expert(s) --- What's a Performa?
Right now, one
of the two boxes is sitting, and has been for several hours,
trying to reconstruct the work surface, or whatever it's called. It doesn't
look as though it needs that service, but the machine won't go beyond that
point. It's about 4:45 now and it's been at it since about 2:30. I'm
inclined
to try a backup on the other machine, if that's possible.
Sounds like you may have a problem with the OS. Unless you know the
direct history of these machines (ie: you know everything that has been
run and installed on them), I would recommend you reformat and reinstall
the OS from scratch. Sitting waiting for the Finder do come up is
definatly NOT normal. You mentioned in a previous post that you had
problems with the mouse cursor freezing for a while, and then coming
back... that shouldn't happen, and the fact that it does really tells me
you have something wrong. Could be an extension conflict, could be a
virus, could be a corrupt file. But since you aren't a very mac literate
person (yet... once you start using it, you will catch on fast), you are
best off just wiping the drive and installing the OS from scratch.
You can download System 7.5.5 from Apple's web site, or if you want it on
a bootable CD, let me know, I will be happy to send you one. If you have
the CD that came with the Mac, it should let you totally restore the
drive to factory settings... unfortunatly, I don't recall if the Performa
630 came with a restore CD or not (I know earlier performa's did not, I
am just not sure if apple started supplying it when they started shipping
ones with internal CDs). If you DO have a restore CD for that machine,
then I would recommend you just run it. That will put you back to a
fresh, stable environment, with some basic applications that you can use.
From there, you can move to more advanced stuff.
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>