Got an email from a friend in LA who is moving, and says that my SE/30 needs to come home which has stimulated my love for my old warrior. My souped up, partitioned Pismo is my daily machine with 10.3.9 for surfing and 9.2.2 for my 'real' work.
Looking for any suggestions to soup up my assembled-in-Ireland beauty (been reading the threads...some not so easy to understand). I don't want to try to go online with it. I would like to just give it a bigger HD, more RAM, and such and will be able to swap floppies with my 9.2.2 partition if I need to.
Back in the day I had an ext CD player attached. Have none of the cables, and scuzzy stuff, etc. anymore. It has a ResEdit hacked 7.5.5 with the "look" of an 8 or 9 OS.
I would be willing to drop a couple of bills into it. It is in perfect shape.
Thanks in advance for any help.
DesertMac
The SE/30 takes standard 30-pin SIMMs, but in matched sets of four. (There are 8 slots in all). It can take up to 128 MB (16 MB * 8).
For a hard drive, a standard 50-pin SCSI drive should do. Also, if you have a Zip 100 (external SCSI) around, it's a good way to transfer larger data.
Other upgrades are the Micron Xceed graphics card (rare / expensive), CPU accelerator (also rare/expensive), and Ethernet card (even rarer).
I have a large collection of Mac software, so if you need a specific app, PM me and I'll see if I have it.
The look of 8/9 OS is provided by the Appearance extension and control panel.
As a fellow SE/30 lover, here's exactly what you need:
1) 32MB of RAM. (More isn't really necessary as you won't be doing anything on the web or in Photoshop.)
2) A fast 7,200rpm hard drive in a size of 2GB. I have a 4GB drive on my SE/30 partitioned so System 6 can see all partitions. But unless you want to have all the software that ever was compatible with an 030 on your Mac, you probably won't need more than 2GB, which means you won't need to worry about partitioning.
3) An accelerator. I've tried 040 and 030 PDS types, and I recommend the DiiMO 50MHz 030, which I myself currently use. They can be purchased brand new from a seller in Japan (where I got mine). This is described under my Flickr photo of the card here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/66071596@N00/478370007/
4) Even though you aren't connecting to the web, it's still nice to move software onto your SE/30 with ease. I highly recommend a MacCon Ethernet card (PDS) for this purpose. They are commonly found on EBAY. Get one that takes a normal, modern Ethernet cable (not coax) and you'll be fine. There are ways to get the SE/30 to connect to 10.4 Tiger (and possibly Leopard, which I've not personally tested), but if you have an OS 9 G4 Mac, that will serve your purpose just perfectly without your having to install anything special to get networking to function. The OS 9 Mac will even connect to your SE/30 when running System 6.0.8.
5) If you want a speedy experience (even with an accelerator), get rid of those hacks that make System 7 look like OS 8. All it does is slow you down. You don't need it on the SE/30 because the look of OS 8 only looks nifty when you've got a color or grayscale screen. And if you really want to run OS 8.1 or even 7.6.1, you'll need to buy yourself a Mac IIfx or IIsi ROM, which can be done with some serious searching on EBAY for 3-6 months. I know because I obtained both ROMs that way. And yes, the DiiMO is fully compatible with a ROM hack too.
Replacing the capacitors on the motherboard is a must too.
Gary
I dumped my motorcycle a week ago
and am now just getting back on line. Thanks for the info on the SE/30 upgrade to all.
Desert Mac
Oops! Double post
Desert Mac
32MB RAM, 2GB HD, and a network card is what I recommend.
Is the RAM the max for the stock SE/30? Are you talking about an EXT HD??
I don't want to put it on the web but I do love typing on the big ol' keyboard and I can still use a version of AppleWorks that will communicate with my AW 5.0.4, the workhorse of my world.
The max amount of RAM is 128MB for the SE/30, but as I stated previously, 32MB is really all you need. Plus, 32MB is much easier to find on EBAY than the 16MB SIMMs required to get 128MB.
Thanks JDW.
OWC has 16MB 30-pin SIMMs for $9 each. Other vendors have them as well. So if you want to put 128MB of ram into this machine, it shouldn't be too difficult.