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From: Andy Hewitt on 21 May 2010 09:04
We've had a little spate of Mac upgrading here, Emily with her new MDD,
and my BiL has just bought a Quicksilver 733 to replace his old Sawtooth
400. He's happy enough with it anyway (only �35 on eBay).

It was a little rough, but after swapping the hard drives, DVD-RW drive,
RAM (768MB), graphics card, and giving it a good clean, it seems to run
OK. The only bother I had was that it wouldn't startup with the USB 2 >
PCI card I fitted (taken from the sawtooth), remove it and it starts OK.
I put the card into Emily's new MDD, and it works OK in that. Hmmm, oh
well (it's an NEC chipset one, which googling says is the one to go
for).

I put all the bits back into the Sawtooth, and transpires that the QS
had a dodgy graphics card, and a bad RAM stick. That's OK, the Sawtooth
is a spare now anyway. More juggling about finds I now have 256MB of RAM
for the Sawtooth, unfortunately only half the RAM on the 512MB module is
working, and brings up an error. Oh well, into the bin with that then.

I've setup this old beast with OS 9, and running it just to play some
old games on it (I was really missing Chuck Yeager, and Sub Simulator).
Quick amazing how nippy that is really. The graphics card does work, but
is showing a very poor display, slightly greyed with horizontal banding.

The annoying bit is, I had a few spares some while ago, and flogged them
on eBay, now I've got to go an get another one. Bum.

On a lighter side, I'm rather impressed with how well these old beasties
hold up against modern boxes. Emily's MDD is a real flier, especially
with a 250GB drive, and a full 2GB of RAM This one has the Radeon 9000
Pro card in it. My Mum and BiL are now using Quicksilver 733s, and they
are quite happy with the performance of those running on OS 10.4 - both
use iPhoto. Indeed, I don't find them too tedious to use myself. And,
the old Sawtooth with 9.2 on it isn't too shabby either.

--
Andy Hewitt
<http://web.me.com/andrewhewitt1/>
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