The 6400 Zone is created to help you gain access to useful software updates and great shareware programs that add functionality to your system. It is also a one stop road map to other informative sites for answering your questions. Most of the info here is geared towards the 6400, but it is useful for all PCI Performa models and even the 6500 and all-in-one Macs based on the same. It's even useful to other MAC systems. I will be referring to my 6400/200 clocked to 220Mhz as just 6400/220, OK.

I will keep it updated as often as I can but I don't have much free time to work on it, so I suggest you check back at least once a week. That should be sufficient. If you don't see something you would like to see here or have your own software / web site that would benefit the MAC community, please write to me at TMK12v@aol.com and I will check it out.

• Current problems with my system

Reader Requests updated: Keith fixed his QK 4 startup freeze issue buy just trashing the prefs. Let this be a reminder that the Pref file is usually the first or at least second thing to suspect as being a problem with an app or startup file.

Dan just got a 6360 and would like info from anyone who has over clocked one. Click here for more details.

And maybe someone can answer this one rather quick. Al is having trouble getting QT 4 to install. I asked him to try redownloading the installer but maybe one of you has another solution. Thanks

[Hi:
I have a Performa 6400-200, 104 mg, OS 8.6 and a G3 Vimage 240 upgrade. I can't get QT 4 to download. I have the QT 3 Pro. I have the downloader OK but the next step goes almost all the way and then quits with an error message. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Al - earl4@interactive.net]

News on Newers 6400 G3 upgrade: I don't know if the posting I found on MacFixIt's site below means Newer has their 6400 G3 ready or not but they are making a nice bundle for us. Its listed for education resellers but I wonder if they will make a consumer bundle? read on.

[300 MHz MAXpowr G3 & 10/100 Ethernet Bundle $399: :Newer Technology, Inc. the original developer of third party Macintosh processor upgrades, today announced a product pairing of a G3 processor upgrade with the Farallon Communications Fast EtherTX-10/100 Comm Slot II Card. Farallon has a long and successful history developing plug and play network interface cards. The Newer Technology 300MHz MAXpowr G3-L2E G3 processor upgrade and the Fast EtherTX-10/100 Comm Slot II Card are designed for the most popular Power Mac and Performa models used primarily in the education market. Its compatible with the Power Mac 5400, 5500, 6400, 6500; Apple Performa 5400, 5410, 5420, 5430, 5440, 5500, 6360, 6400, 6410 and 6420. The MAXpowr G3-L2E and Farallon EtherTX 10/100 bundle is available July 5th from Authorized Education Resellers at an estimated street price of $399, part number 120576."]

Funny how they are advertising this but no mention on whether the G3 card is even ready for consumer sales?

UPDATE on Farallons 2.0 extension for their 10/100 COMM II ethernet card not compatible with OS 8.6: Paul emailed saying he had the same problem but it may not have been the Farallon extension causing the problem. All I know is that when I reinstall the older 1.1 version the problem goes away. Thanks Paul.

[I had this same problem when I first installed 8.6. I e-mailed Farallon and got a response that said they had not seen this problem before. I managed to resolve the freezes and it was not due to the Farallon 2.0 extension. I think it was BeHierarchic (3.1.1) that was the offending control panel but I honestly can not remember what I had to do to fix it. I have been racking my brain all day trying to remember the fix. If I do remember I'll post ASAP
Paul]

UPDATE on the Crescendo hack: Carl emailed to give me info on his tests with my Crescendo extension hack to fix Sonnets G3. Thanks Carl.

[Thanks Tom, once again your page has provided the support found nowhere else. I used the Crescendo hack and the Powerlogix control panel.......along with the font fix extension, and everything purrrs along perfectly with 8.6.
I did start-up the next day, and my screen went black right at the point where the first extension (newly hacked Crescendo) loads. I restarted with extensions off, looked in the Prefs folder and scrapped the only 4 itmes with the time of crash. I trashed them, and now it works fine. One of them was the new OS preferences file. This has been the cause of a couple of infrequent problems. Maybe the Appearance manager has a "bug to be identified".

Regards,
Carl]

He later emailed me the names of the pref files he had to trash.

[The 4 pref files were: Date & Time, Control Strip,Sound,MacOS......I always make a habit of dumping TSM and ASLM pref files too, but I didn't to solve the blaclout problem on startup.

I missed one. It crashed again on startup, and I also dumped File Exchange prefs. Then it works fine. SO it has something to do with one of those 5.]

I checked all of these and they all are of type "APPC". On my Hack info page I tell you to make the Crescendo extension type "scri" to get it to load before the other extensions. I wonder if "APPC" even loads before "scri"? I will try and see what happens.

UPDATE: I just tried it and changing the type to "APPC" did not make them load early. I suppose those few items load early or have their pref files changed early for some other reason? Maybe they were just corrupted from past use?

Reply from Sonnet on Hack: Anton wrote Sonnet on the topics the Hack fixes and here is their reply. It seems they don't think these are a problem. Tell that to me and the others that get more stable systems with the Hack. Thanks Anton. I will email Joey and see what he thinks too.

[Tom,
I just read your page about the patches for the speculative access and want to relay a reply I got from a Sonnet technician. I was out of town for the last two weeks and have not had time to try your patch, but it sounds to me that it might still be wortwile to do, despite Sonnet's claim. Maybe the collective user experience will show Sonnet that this might be beneficial. Also Joey of www.joecard.com might have the technical expertise to judge whether Sonnet is right or not.
Anton

------begin included message----
>Anton R. Schep,
> To address your first question, Speculative Adressing is left enabled to allow protection >for I/O addressing. As for D(ynamic)P(ower)M(anagement), it is left is it's state to maximize the
>performance of the processor. At this point, Sonnet has no plans on modifying these 2 features.

>Mike J. Wong
>Hardware/Software QA Analyst
>Sonnet Technologies, Inc.]

Drive Setup causing HD issues on 6400s?: I found this topic on Mike Breeden's Accelerate Your Mac web site. One person thinks that all the HD issues the 6400 has been having are created by using Drive Setup (Apples disk formatting utility). Personally I never had an issue with Drive Setup. Click here to read all the info I gathered from his web site. Thanks Mike.

Apples 6400 take apart manual: Apple has once again removed their manuals from being downloaded. The link I had to their Euro address now requires special access privilages :( I have my own version posted for anyone that wishes to take their case apart.

Trouble with Apples QuickTake 100 camera with Vimages G3 installed: Roy sends word that he cannot get a successful download of images from his QuickTake 100 after having Vimages G3 installed. I also posted a reply with some of my tips I gave to him. Thanks for the info Roy.

[I've enjoyed your page for quite some time now and want to thank you for all I've learned here. I have done a series of upgrades to my 6400/180 and they have all proved to work wonderful.
Currently running 8.5, Vimages 240mhz G3 card, 136MB RAM and an external USRobotics 56K modem.
But I'm having trouble with an old QuickTake 100 camera I used to be able to use before I made all those upgrades. For some reason my 6400 won't download the pics from the camera any more. It starts to and in some cases will actually down load a couple but then it stops. The message I get is that the camera is not responding. I've tried the camera on other Macs with 8.5 and it works fine.
I've tried reinstalling the software several times, changed batteries until I'm blue in the face, increased the memory allocation to the program.......nothing seems to be working.
I've posted this problem on several other message boards and the response has been almost nothing. Guess I'm the only one out there still using a QuickTake 100. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks, Roy]

[>Have you tried setting your G3 to More Compatible in the Vpower control panel?
>Maybe this will help? Have you tried removing the Vpower extension and
>rebooting and then see what happens?

Tom,
The second idea worked. I had to disable the Vpower extension and control panel through the Extensions manager. It worked just like it used to...just fine..although considerably slower than I've grown used to.
Thanks again for your advise and please feel free to post my letter and "our" solution if you want.
Roy]

I have further asked him to try the latest Vpower drivers which allows you to disable the cache completely on the fly and see what happens. To have to disable the G3 and reboot is a lousy fix :(

US pricing for BlackFires IDE-SCSI adaptor: Alex said he was told by BlackFire that their card sells for $70 US which is about $50 cheaper then the TurboMax. Although only one drive can be attached to the BlackFire card and 4 to the TurboMax. Also he question about the drive bracket is a good one. You should use a bracket as it keeps the drive from moving around during transport. It is possible to run the drive in that upper bay with out a bracket but I wouldn't advise it.

[I just got an e-mail from the Black*Fire folks and they said the price in US dollars is about $70. I noticed in Dirk Paul Flach's reveiw he doesn't mention anything about a mounting bracket for his IDE drive, in fact he says," Lay the drive on the bottom of the bay,". My question is thus..how critical is it to use a mounting bracket?Could I use the one that came with my Maxtor 8.8GB drive?(I'm thinking about putting the old 2.5GB drive in the expansion bay)
Thanks you,
Alex]

I found a great way to earn some money while getting great deals to you on Macintosh books and software plus they have all kinds of other books, music, and more. Please click on the amazon.com link on the top of this page whenever you feel like purchasing something to help sponsor this site. If you're unsure of what you want and wish to get a list of Mac related items, just type Macintosh in the search field on their home page and you will be presented with many choices to select.

Jeff did some digging in to the new code that displays the frames on my site with AOL ads and found a link that can be used which will not show those annoying ads. Here is the address. http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/TMK12v/home.html
Thanks Jeff, for sending this info. PS don't let AOL find out :)

I have been having a pause in all apps and the mouse when using Logitecs USB Wheel mouse on an ADS USB card. I haven't traced it down but one other person had a similar issue but with an ADB trackball which means it may not be a USB issue? Click here for more info.

I use a Performa 6400/180 OS 8.6, Performa 6400/200 OS 8.6, PowerBook G3/233 OS 8.6, and a PowerBook DUO 270c OS 7.5.5. All of the software updates posted here are currently running on one or the other with minimal problems. If I do encounter a problem, I will post it for all to read and respond to. If you are having any problems and would like help just email me and if I can answer it I will, or I will post it here for others to read and respond to.