A week in Quicksilver Hell

A

AlanBannacheck

Registered
To those who are knowledgeable about Macintosh G4 Powermac Quicksilver,

I am a student at Dunwoody College of Technology for computer networking so already owning a Powerbook G3 Wallstreet and ibook g4 I thought I’d buy the quicksilver and teach myself how to network Macintosh computers together.

I bought a Quicksilver 733 mhz processor with Front Bus Speed of 133 MB. Well the man who sold it to told me that it had 700 something MB of ram. When I arrived at home, eagerly anticipating playing with my new toy, I discovered the computer was only registering 128 mb of ram even though there was three sticks already in there. I went to Que Computers the next day and purchased two 512 mb of ram and booted her up. She wouldn’t start. Finally after obtaining 12 different SDRAM sticks at school I managed to get it up to 512mb, the rest were unreadable in the machine.
During the ram testing I would sometimes get the message you need to restart your computer. Also after I did get the ram working I would often still get that message or a black screen. The monitor led would still be green though. I reset the PRAM many times and used open firmware to try and troubleshoot

For some reason, when I upgraded the video card to an ati 7000 that problem vanished. Although it still won't recognize a 512 stick.

Then there was the fact that classic support and environment had disappeared, I finally located my disc for my ibook G4 and solved the second problem

Finally I had it working, then to my dismay, when I turned the power on, the fans would turn on for a brief few seconds and then the computer would shut off. I am stuck. Either trying all of the different rams fried the motherboard or I have a power supply issue. I took out all of the cards hds, and everything and the same thing happened. I tried pressing the reset button by the PRAM battery (CMOS chip) and still nothing. I am getting frustrated to say the least. Upgrading the powerbook was a cinch.
My question is power supply or motherboard. If power supply could I use a G3 BW power supply even though it has a little smaller voltage or should I suck it up and get a new power supply. Also instructions on how to change a ps would be useful.

Many Thanks,
Alan Bannacheck

 
I took the power supply out of my 933 Quicksilver a year or so back. The Quicksilver was the first design with a drop down side for easy access. Undo the retaining screws on the left hand panel, then release the clip and the side drops down. Power supply is on the far side. Removing was fairly obvious if I'm remembering correctly.

Mine got to the stage that if I shut it down for more than 24 hours the fan would stick and had to be poked before it would get going. When I took the PS out I just put some drops of silicone lube on the fan spindle. It was OK for another week or so, but then started to stick again.

I also had problems with the networking. I networked with my work hp laptop and also with a G4 iBook at first, then later with the MacBook. Getting the Quicksilver (running 10.4.11 at the end) was never certain. It was connected via ethernet, as was the hp laptop. I had a lot of trouble getting it recognised by the other computers. I bought a MacMini to replace it and ran them all at the same time for some weeks while I slowly migrated stuff across. Again I could never rely on the Quicksilver linking into the network. Usually it responded to a restart before the ethernet would "wakeup".

On its own though, for the four or five years it was my main computer, it was superb as a standalone unit. I upgraded the memory with no problem.
 
Yeah the four hours it ran like a champ I looked at some netwoking utilities and didn't get too far. I just started learning about DNS and DHCP services and the terminology was different. Is there a way I could use a G#power supply?
 
sgould said:
The Quicksilver was the first design with a drop down side for easy access.
Click to expand...

Quite certainly not. The Quicksilver was one of the later such cases in fact. There were G4s running at as low a speed as 350 MHz that had the same basic case, and before that even, there was the blue & white G3 which introduced the case.
 
The case design was called "El Capitan," just for a tidbit of information.

And yeah, I'm with fryke here -- the Quicksilver was actually the second to last G4 model that used that case design. There were no less than 4 G3/G4 models that used that case design prior to the Quicksilver (the B&W G3, the PCI-based G4, the AGP-based G4, and the "digital audio" G4).
 
I had this exact model as my first Mac. By the sounds of it you were sticking in incompatible RAM modules. The RAM used by these machine are now considered antique, and if you get the wrong ones you would get the kernal panics you described (and I assume you could even do damage). They certainly run better with plenty of RAM, though for a taste of modern OSX, you'd be better to find an older Intel Mac Mini.
The Quicksilvers seemed to mostly die from failed logic boards or power supplies – mine blew it's logic board. You may have had this happen. I would suggest you try replacing the CMOS battery though, as they go flat after a few years, and I would certainly expect an original one to be on it's last legs in yours. The machines will not start up without one.
 
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