Help with a mac

_sheep

Right heres the story, getting a mac laptop off a friend, basically i need a laptop for college, all i need to use is word so i can type up projects for college etc etc....

Its pretty old, only has a floppy drive(broken), a network card and a battery(:P). Its got word/excel everything already installed, its just that i need a printer for it, now heres where it gets messy.

Need a printer for her (where would i get that, btw im in tipp&waterford mainly), and lets pretend i do get a printer how am i going to install her software, the floppy is not working.

Get a new floppy drive i guess, but this is so old i dont know would i get one ?

tis prolly about 4/5 years old and was relased just before ibooks afaik

RicardoSmith

It should have a model number. If you tell us what that is we might have more info for you. The important thing to find out is does it have a usb port or not. If it doesn't then the only printer that will work with it is one with a mac serial port, and they are not easy to find these days. I don't think there have been any new printers with that for quite a while. If you have access to another mac with a floppy drive you could network both of them and copy files that way. It might also have a scsi port on it and if it does you might be able to hook a scsi cdrom to it and get files to it that way. Some one with a mac will have to copy them onto the cd first though.

In fact it might be easier to get the floppy drive fixed. There are places in the UK that will do this for you, for not much money. Pick up a UK mac magazine and look up the small ads in the back. Lots of places that deal with older macs there. You could probably source a printer and software from them aswell. Lots of them deliver by post too.

If you are really stuck drop me an email and we'll see what we can do. Incidentally I'm using a 10yr old and a 5yr old mac with a Epson Stylus 750 (though its on its last legs).

_sheep

Thanks m8 big help, gonna see what i can do to the laptop this week so

_sheep

btw, no usb port

*yes i know i coulda press'd edit but reply was closer at the time

Dr_Teeth

If the network card is working, and you have another Mac you can use for a short time you should be ok. Just buy a 'cross over' network cable (one that can connect one compute to another - normal network cables only connect a computer to a hub/switch), plug the two Macs together via their network cards, set Appletalk to work over the ethernet port and turn on filesharing.

You should now be able to copy files between the two Macs very easily. The cable can be bought in any decent computer/electronics place like Peats or Maplins etc.

As for the printer itself.. well you can buy a nice new expensive one that has a network connection, and use the network card and cable as above. Or you can buy an old Apple Laserwriter that has a serial connection which should plug directly into the serial port on the laptop.

Teeth.

timod

Originally posted by Dr_Teeth
If the network card is working, and you have another Mac you can use for a short time you should be ok. Just buy a 'cross over' network cable (one that can connect one compute to another - normal network cables only connect a computer to a hub/switch), plug the two Macs together via their network cards, set Appletalk to work over the ethernet port and turn on filesharing.

Or, since you'll be getting a serial printer, just use the serial cable to nework the two macs. (It's slow, but should do the job fine, assuming the other mac has a serial port)

_sheep

well networking them over a serial cable is not neccisary since i have all the cables already (have a couple of pcs networked already at home )

I should have the laptop in a few hours now, ill search and try to put a name on the model. Any chance you lads reckon id be able to put like OSX or something on to it ?

Gordon

OSX takes up loads of memory and loads of space on the hard drive (Jaguar took up about a gig on my iMac if I remember). If you have an old laptop I doubt it would be capable of running it. How would you install it anyway if you have no cd, just download it from another computer?

_sheep

right its a powerbook 1400cs, looks like a gig of a hdd, ands got everything i need installed

just need to get a printer (getting one of conZ), mac serial printer.

all that remains is to get the floopy fixed, there any mac places in waterford ??????????

RicardoSmith

OSX isn't supported on that machine. Some unsupported machines can use XPostFacto to allow you to install OSX but the powerbook 1400cs isn't one of them. It would run like treacle anyway so it wouldn't be a great idea.

_sheep

tnx for teh help lads