Macintosh II Repair and Upgrade Secrets
Macintosh II Repair and Upgrade Secrets is Larry Pina's Mac II companion to Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets: Brady Publishing, a division of Simon & Schuster, 1991, ISBN 0-13-929530-5, Library of Congress 91-37576, 283 pages. The wiki's page title omits the year; the file is named Macintosh II Repair and Upgrade Secrets 1991.pdf.
What it covers
[edit | edit source]The modular Macintosh II family, which the earlier book does not touch at all. Its centre of gravity is upgrades and drives rather than analogue-board repair, because the Mac II has no internal CRT.
- Colour Test Pattern Generator (Color TPG v2.15) — Pina's own alignment software, shipped with
the book, for checking screen size, linearity and geometry after a screen or memory upgrade
- 8 — FDHD disk drive upgrades (p. 189): 400K, 800K and 1.4 MB drives, formatting rules,
building an external disk drive adapter, installing a second internal drive, fitting an FDHD/ROM upgrade into a Macintosh II, troubleshooting 800K drives, types of cleaning diskette
- 9 — SCSI hard drive upgrades (p. 205): SCSI interfaces, form factors, setting the bus
ID, pin header locations and labelling, checking termination, terminator orientation, terminator filters, installation kits, formatting software, cables, mounting brackets
What it settles
[edit | edit source]Pina measures the Macintosh II PRAM cells independently of Apple and the two agree. The cells are Tadiran 3.6 V lithium inorganic in separate battery boxes; good cells read 3.2–3.85 V, weak cells 2.3–3.1 V, and any cell below 2.3 V is dead. Apple's own Service Source threshold for the same machine is "replace if below 3.2 V", which is exactly the bottom of Pina's "good" band — so Apple's threshold is a replace-before-it-fails figure, not a failed-cell figure.
What it does not contain
[edit | edit source]- No analogue-board parts lists. The four parts-list appendices are in the other book and
cover the compact Macs, not the II.
- No schematic.
- It is a secondary source.
Pages that cite this document
[edit | edit source]- Macintosh II and Macintosh II/IIx/IIfx Service Source — the battery measurement
- Apple SuperDrive and Macintosh Floppy Drive Maintenance — the FDHD upgrade and drive work
- Hard Drive Maintenance and Repair — SCSI ID, termination and terminator filters
- Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets, The Dead Mac Scrolls
Download: Macintosh_II_Repair_and_Upgrade_Secrets_1991.pdf (44.9 MB)