clive@drutx.ATT.COM (Clive Steward) (02/06/88)
Well, the short of it is, I got a new system board which has no heat
problems, and now can say:
1) Multifinder works flawlessly, with many applications open, and is
a real joy. This is what I bought this Mac for in 1984.
With 2 meg upgrade (2.5 meg usable), you can run Word 3.01, Hypercard,
Superpaint 1.0sp, MacProject 1.2, and Versaterm 3.10 all at once, and
get a lot of work done, cutting, pasting, and looking between windows.
Thank you, Apple. And especially those who gave thoughtful and helpful
information towards resolving problems.
2) Suitcase seems to have a time bomb. To see it, set your Mac's date
to somewhere above 28 February, 1994, then reboot. (To get back on
the air, reboot again with the shift and option keys down, then
reset the date, boot again.) With a vanilla Plus or SE, you'll get
an 02 bomb. Inits may vary your mileage.
This complicated the repair picture, since newer system boards
seem to come up with the internal time at maximum, rather than
minimum, before their pram is set. Loads of fun, and my dealer
now has 2 extra boards with the 1 meg simm resistor cut.
3) While everything does indeed seem to work fine with the standard
160K Finder SIZE allocation, as alluded to by others, this isn't
always quite enough.
Desktop rebuilds under Multifinder with a full 45 mb (PCPC, at least)
drive require 180K allocation, or else will be incomplete. This is
flagged with an alert, so you don't have to worry you've missed something.
On the other hand, Larry Rosenstein's kindly shared experience is
born out; induced crashes (programmer switch) are completely
recovered (other than possible desktop damage) with the standard
allocation. So you can use this, and just go to single tasking for
the times you want to rebuild the desktop. As noted, this is easily
accomplished by booting with clover key for single Finder, starting
an application, then quitting it with clover and option down.
4) The best boot blocks setting (using CE's Widgets, or Fedit+) for
initial System Heap allocation on Finder 4.2/System 6.0 seems a bit
more complicated and preferential to arrive at, but workable.
I prefer to have that setting at the nominal; not expanded. Most
of the time, this gives perfect functioning: the heap is automatically
expanded per DA opened (watch the System bar in About Finder), and
you can run as many (even huge) DA's as you have memory.
The exception comes when some case of memory use has locked the
area above the initial Heap, such as by having run apps up to or
near the max for your memory. Then even closing applications
won't allow DA's to open, until you get the right one.
For this case, it might have been better to have pre-allocated
some extra space; as noted, the Upgrade distribution disks from Apple
have 80k additional.
The trouble is, I noticed problems sometimes with this kind of setup,
especially with something smaller set aside, like 16 or 32k. The problem
seemed to be that some da's wouldn't allocate enough if they had some
memory to start with.
I haven't tried to go back and duplicate this, now that everything
else in the machine is in known good shape, so might be wrong here.
I like the way it works with the nominal, which is hex C000 in
Fedit+, or 0k Extra allocation with Widgets.
5) The cross-interference between McSink under Suitcase and MacTerminal
2.2 is real; auto-opening (application, no document) under Multifinder
will give a specious message about a damaged document (remember,
you didn't give one), on a plain SE or Plus. Just got another copy of
McSink, and a quick peruse with ResEdit didn't show why easily.
Maybe it'll turn up later.
The bottom line is, this is a really nice setup. In addition to the
programs listed above, I'm running Larry Rosenstein's AutoIdle and
ApplicationMenu inits (Must Have), and CheapBeep giving Darth Vader's
"You have failed me, for the last time...".
I think so.
Clive Steward
Consulting Engineer