Memories of My Life Since Buying an Apple Macintosh 6500/250
I read your story with a little bit of misty-eyed reflection. I felt the same way about my old Mac SE about five years ago when we decided it was too small to support what we wanted for the family. Only in its heyday, I had to cruise the fledgling cyberspace with Kermit and Prodigy(!) through a 9600 baud modem. Anyway, we replaced it with a beige G3 desktop, later added a Power Mac 7100/80 for my daughter, gave that to my son when we got a Umax SuperMac C600/240 for my daughter, and rounded out the collection with a PowerBook G3 (Lombard) for myself (I use it for my work, since the company for which I work is controlled by the Wintel Borg collective). Now we definitely can’t afford a new Mac, much as I desperately want to use Mac OS X. (Can’t run it “effectively” on any of our machines.)
Anyhow, I’m writing to you to recommend that you continue to try to upgrade the OS on your machine. Its essentially the same as my daughter’s SuperMac (except you don’t need FWB Toolkit to use the CD drive), has the same ROM, and all our machines are currently running Mac OS 9.1. I’ve found it to be snappier and more stable than Mac OS 8.0, and think you will notice a difference. We’ve even put an ATI graphics board & Ethernet card into the SuperMac to extend its lifetime. Have you tried adding more memory to it? My daughter’s machine is maxed out with 144 MB RAM, but it really purrs and can still run most of the newer games coming out. I know Apple wants you to replace it with another, newer Apple computer, but it seems to me that if its still useful, why upgrade? $300 for more memory and Mac OS 9.1 is much cheaper than a new iMac or iBook. (On the other hand, those machines really don’t cost that much, especially compared to what the 6500 cost brand new.)
That’s my unsolicited $0.02 worth.
Thanks for the great article.
—Kevin
Setting up a Hardware Router
First of all, this article (and the subsequent comments) have been extremely helpful in helping me successfully network my computers. However, I am having one nagging problem. I can either have the computers (one PC/WXP and one Mac 9.1.2) communicate with each other or with the Internet, but not at the same time. I have the Barricade router and am using an evaluation version of Dave to network the computers. Does you know if it is possible to have Dave work with DHCP or to have the router work with manually entered IP addresses? Any additional suggestions (and/or recommended alternatives to Dave) would be greatly appreciated.
—Jen
This ought to work:
1) Hook both computers to the router. Configure the router for DHCP first, then skip to the alternate procedure below if that fails.
2) Set up both computers to use the router’s DHCP—this usually just means entering the router's IP in the TCP/IP control panel and making sure Connect Via is set to Ethernet.
3) Set up DAVE to use the Ethernet connection.
Alternate:
1) Configure router to assign a static IP to each computer. Consult documentation for the router if you need to.
2) Configure each computer to use its assigned static IP via Ethernet.
3) Same as above.
The above will not work if the router is one of the very rare few that doesn't have a built-in Ethernet switch as well; I'm not familiar with SMC’s products so I can't say for sure. If this is the case, I would advise you to get a different router, preferably not a Linksys, for which I've seen many reports of trouble. —Chris Lawson
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