OT: paging MAC expert(s) --- What's a Performa? - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

17 Nov 2001

...
 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. 
hehe, yeah, but that mac is so damn easy to learn, you may become 
"mac-literate" by accident just in your quick use.

...
 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). 
Definitly just reformat and start from scratch then. If you are giving 
them away, no sense even messing around trying to get the software 
working as it. Reformat, reinstall, and hand them off knowing they will 
work fine when YOU give them away.

...
 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. 
Actually, System 7.5.5 is freely available from Apple's web site. So if 
you have the tools, you can make a bootable OS install disk yourself, and 
distribute it with the Mac, safely, and legally. I assume you DON'T have 
the tools (like another Mac with a CD burner and a copy of Toast), so if 
you want one, I will make one for you and mail it over to you (free of 
charge, since it will really only cost me less than a buck a disk with 
postage).

...
 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? 
UGH... no, that means the machines probably didn't come with a restore 
CD. To cut costs with the performa line, apple stopped shipping them with 
install disks. Instead, they made a little "Backup" program, and you were 
supposed to purchase a box (a big box, since it needs like 25 or 50) of 
disks, and run the backup program. It would then create the install disks 
for you, to hang on to until the day you needed to reinstall. Annoying to 
say the least. Unfortuantly, the backup program will ONLY write to 
floppies, so you can't hook up a scsi tape drive and go to that (besides, 
the Mac has no built in drivers for a tape drive, so you would need 
software like Retrospect to access it anyway).

I can probably hunt down a set of install disks for the Performa 630 (I 
might actually have such already, I have to see if I got the original 
software with one of them that I recovered) if you need them. Sounds like 
you might already have the original software CDs. If one is called 
Software Restore, then you are good to go, but that backup program makes 
me think you don't have it (I think I have one for a Performa 638CD, 
which is basically the same machine, slightly different bundle). If I 
have it, I can always make you two copies of it (again, since you have 
the machine they go to, there should be nothing legally wrong with 
getting copies from me).

-chris

<http://www.mythtech.net>