540C Startup question

[Tedster]

Okay, a trip to the Dallas Sidewalk Sale (elecronics flea market) turned up a Powerbook 540C for $20!! It works!

I am new to Apple and really new to this machine. My Apple collection is now a 512K Fat Mac and this PowerBook. I wanted this 540C machine to help me transfer files downloaded from the web to my Fat Mac.

A couple of questions:
During startup after the Happy Mac appears and while the Welcome message is being displayed I see a series of icons along the bottom of the screen. They are puzzle piece shaped with various pictures on them. One looks like a womans head and another looks like a 3d graph. They disappear once the boot is complete and are replaced by the normal toobar at the bottom of the screen.

My problem is that the 540C hangs on the icon that looks like a 3d graph for over 5 minutes. Anyone know what these are and how I can be rid of them?

My other queston is that the system runs really really slow. I think it is running OS7 but I need to explore that some more. I have set the virtual memory up and created a RAM disk and that helped but it is still slow. Is this normal?

Thanks for the info!!!
Tedster (new Apple user!)

 

[Sharkonwheels]

I think you're in the wrong section for a Blackbird (nickname of the 540/550 series). Should be in the Mac section, as this is a 680LC040 based powerbook.

I believe if you boot holding the shift key after turning it on, you can disable all extensions, and then go into extension manager and enable only the ones you need. You should be able to see the icon there, as well, so you can just disable the one that;s giving problems.


Tony

 

[RichCini]

I have a 540c also; it's a great little machine and I use it as a "bridge" machine between the real world and the emulation world. I use it to convert lower-density disk images (400k/800k) to 1.4mb for use with Basilisk or vMac.

Here's an article from the Apple DocsInfo site that describes disabling extensions. Once you start Extension Manager, you can disable the offending extension (if it's obvious). I've had conflicts where I've had to disable everything and then add them back one at a time.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=17392