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| SE Maintenance |
| Written by Gareth Hay | ||||
| Wednesday, 09 August 2006 | ||||
Blazing 256k of RAM
 This article, I am going to guide you through a few simple tasks that you may need to perform to either get you vintage working, or just to beef it up a bit and make it more usable. I’ve already covered the installation of an expansion card, so I will only make a brief mention of it in this article. PREPARING FOR MAINTANENCE As always, opening a vintage all-in-one Mac is dangerous. While there are devices internal to these older Macs to help discharge dangerous voltages, remember that these too are antiques and can fail like any part out there. Therefore, you should always discharge the CRT with the appropriate tools before proceeding onto anything else, and especially before grounding yourself with anti-static precautions. You will require a Long handled Torx (T-15) screwdriver, and a CRT discharge tool (covered previous articles). If your Mac also has an optional ‘programmers switch’ you will need to remove this too. Go ahead and unscrew the 2 torx screws within the handle of the Mac and the 2 black torx screws on the panel at the bottom of the Mac with all the connection ports on it. Discharge the CRT to the grounding lug. Insert the probe underneath the rubber cap, and touch the anode at the center. Discharge tools vary in their operation, but it is wise to use it one-handed, keeping the second hand behind your back. 
To complete the removal of the hard drive, you need to remove two screws from the chassis, shown in the picture with 2 red arrows. Once unscrewed you can pull directly upwards on the hard drive to remove it. The hard drive will be attached to it’s carrier by 2 screws on either side. To replace the drive, work in reverse. Remember that you may require a boot floppy with a Hard Disk format utility to be able to complete this modification. You can see my first article for details on producing a System 6 boot disk, which comes with Apples formatting utility. [Editor's note: we're still transferring all our old content, so this article is currently unavailable. Check beck regularly for updates.] 
The SE/30 should be able to take as big a SCSI drive as you can throw at it internally, as long as the SCSI connector matches the one shown here. Newer and bigger SCSI drives are more likely to have a Wide SCSI or UltraSCSI connector instead, and obviously won’t work. If the inside of your vintage is dusty, your best bet is to use an air compressor, like you would find powering a builder’s nail gun, without the nail gun attachment. This is much more effective than the expensive cans of air you can buy, and better still than an ordinary vacuum cleaner. 
RAM MAINTANENCE Once you are down as far as the hard drive, and have it removed, it is trivial to remove the main logic board. Provided you have removed all the cables, the logic board slides up a few centimeters until the circuit board reaches small gaps in the frame on the right hand side. Once aligned, the board pulls slightly forward and then out from the frame on the left side. Be careful the speaker cable is attached, and pulling the logic board too quickly will break it. Vintage Macs use Single Inline Memory Modules or SIMMs. One of the disadvantages of this is they had to be installed in pairs, or sets. In the case of the SE/30, you have 2 ‘banks’ of 4 slots. So 8 slots in total. The first 4 and the second 4 are banks A and B respectively, as you look at the picture, Bank A are the furthest away. To clean these, simply pull them all out and blast them thoroughly with a can of air. Or, if grime has really built up over the years, carefully use rubbing alchohol with Qtips. Don't forget to clean the slot too. You may also want to add or replace exhisting SIMMs. You must always use exactly the same size of SIMM for each of the 4 you intend to put in a bank. So, for example, 4 256k SIMMs in bank A would yield 1MB of memory for the SE/30. You must always fill bank A, but you may leave bank B empty. Any 30-pin SIMMs at 120ns or faster are acceptable, up to a maximum size of 16MB each. My SE/30 pictured has 1MB SIMMs in each slot, 8MB total memory. Memory is still available for these machines, with 1MB SIMMs coming in at around $1, up to the 16MB SIMMs at around $15 each. In order to use the maximum 128MB of RAM, you will be required to use an extension called MODE32 (or replace the ROM, more on this below). This allows the SE/30 to properly address all the memory, which was previously impossible due to a limitation in the ROM chip. This will cost about $120 to do, but better deals can be found on eBay. ROM AND PRAM The ROM chip is replaceable. If you are lucky enough to find a Macintosh iisi, which has a similar slot, you can remove it from the iisi and insert it straight into the SE/30. You will then have a ROM chip capable of natively supporting the 128MB maximum RAM configuration without MODE32. This can be cleaned the same way as RAM. If you find that the date and time have been reset each time you reboot, the chances are that your PRAM battery is dead. To replace it, press the 2 sides of the plastic cover towards one another and lift up. The battery should then pull out, and replacements should be easily sourced from OWC or similar stores. FINISHING UP Reassembly is as simple as disassembly; repeat the steps in the reverse order, making sure all cables are securely connected, and screws are hand tight. If, once you have re-assembled the Mac and powered on, there is a picture of a sad Mac, something is not connected correctly. Open her up again and make sure everything is pressed home firmly. Commonly, sad mac errors will be due to an expansion card or mis-configured RAM. It’s worth checking that all the SIMMs are the same size, and that you have correctly filled bank A first. As I mentioned earlier, you may have to boot with a System 6 boot disk, format the hard drive and copy the System Folder to the new HD, then reboot. This frees up the floppy drive to allows you to load all the System 7 disk images. (You might want to invest in a CD-ROM SCSI drive that reads CD recordable media, it’ll save you creating 19 floppies just to load System 7 and we all know how dependable magnetic tape is!). With all this done, hopefully your Mac/SE will run for years!
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