[Duo2400] First Questions

[Ivan Drucker]

>1. There are a row of 10 lights on the front-left (I'm assuming they show
>battery strength), how do they work?

They're holes so the sound from the speaker, which is behind them, can 
get out. No lights. There is no external way of checking battery life.

>2. The keyboard is "sunk in" at the bottom right. On the Duos this was 
>because
>the screws on the underside were too tight. Is this a simple fix like
>loosening some screws? The keys work just fine.

Nothing obvious like it is with the Duos. It is possible that one of the 
plastic "catches" that lock the palmrest into the keyboard isn't properly 
aligned, and maybe is pushing it down? You could follow mine (or someone 
else's) takeapart guide on http://www.sineware.com/mac2400 and take a 
look; that level of disassembly is not very invovled.

>3a. One site I came across said that some of the latter 2400s came with
>cardbus already enabled, if so how can I tell?

If you put in a Cardbus card (like a USB or FireWire card), and the 
machine starts behaving erratically, you're not Cardbus enabled. Note 
that even on Cardbus enabled machines, you'll still freeze during startup 
with Mac OS 9 (but not 8). I don't know of a way of checking without a 
Cardbus card, short of removing the keyboard and examining the 
motherboard for an absence of yellow wires, or two specific resistors 
whose numbers I forgot. From what I can tell, very very few, if any, 
Cardbus-enabled machines were sold in the US (though of course some have 
been modified by their owners to become Cardbus-enabled).

>3b. Are there an pre-cardbus pc-card harddrives?

All PC Card hard drives that I know of are non-Cardbus, including things 
like CF cards in adapters, but I can't swear by this. I think the PC Card 
ATA spec does not require Cardbus. In any case, there are lots of 
non-Cardbus drives. There are some drives out there that even predate 
Cardbus, in sizes like 40 or 80 MB (but wouldn't you rather use a 256 MB 
CF card?). I believe even the Toshiba 5, 10, and 20 GB drives that are 
used in the iPod are plain old PCMCIA (not Cardbus).

I never had a great deal of luck with these old small drives in my 2400 
(the last time I tried was years ago however), they sometimes seemed to 
hang it until ejected, which was a result of them drawing too much power. 
I bought a PCMCIA hard drive enclosure from MCE which was externally 
powered, and that always worked great. CF cards also worked fine for me.

Ivan.