One of my on-again, off-again, side-projects has been getting my Apple //e setup as a dumb terminal for OS X. I've been tinkering with this for about 9-years now, but never really had a setup I was happy with. I occasionally re-visit the project, but could never dedicate the time to get it right. In my ideal setup, I wanted one monitor that handles multiple devices (Atari 7800, G5, Apple //e, etc...). For the most part my Dell 20" LCD has served me well, but o ne source of dissatisfaction with regards to the Apple //e is how it handled the composite video output in 80-column mode. The video would twitch every few seconds which is very annoying and tough to read. About a week ago, the display started to fail. The screen would go black after several minutes of use. I suspect that the inverter is failing, but don't want to just throw $100 at a hunch. For $150, I decided to replace it with a 22" 1080p HDTV instead of a new monitor, primarily because of the variety of...
I've had this Apple ][ Plus for a couple years now, but never taken the time to do any testing. Well, today I was bored, so I powered it up, tested the keys, and gave the case a good cleaning. Most of the keys weren't responding at first, but through rapid button pressing I was able to get them all going again - though some are still flaky. I might need to dig out the contact cleaner. Anyway, I was happily typing in some BASIC code for fun when I heard a sizzling noise and smoke started billowing from the back of the power supply. I quickly unplugged the power cord, but now I'm left with yet another project. At some point I'll tear into the Astec branded PSU and replace what is most likely the C7 capacitor. In the meantime, I may borrow a PSU from a IIe to continue playing with the II Plus.
Currently, I'm working on a laptop for one of my clients and thought I would share a few of the FREE hard drive utilities that I used to get the computer back in working order. First, after a CHKDSK scan revealed and successfully relocated 3000-some-odd bad clusters, I informed my client that the HD would need to be replaced. At this point I decided that cloning the HD to a new drive would be a reasonable course of action. A new 500 GB HD would replace the old 250 GB drive. Here are few utilities that I used to accomplish this: Clonezilla ( http://clonezilla.org/ ), is a Norton Ghost-esque, Debian Linux-based drive cloning live CD. Clonezilla offers several different methods for cloning drives, but for my needs I opted to download and burn the latest stable CD-ROM bootable .iso image to CD. I attached the new HD to the laptop using a SATA-to-USB adapter cable, booted from the Clonezilla CD, and performed a direct local disk to local disk image. The imaging work...
Comments