Power Mac 7200/90 a few issues.

[laserspot1]

I own this powerpc 7200/90 and it always has a loud sweaking sound that come every now and then. It seems like its the motherboard not the fan.

It runs on os 9 and is super slow and there is barely anything installed on it. How should this be fixed?

Also it doesn't seem to read dos/ibm floppies. Is there a way to fix this? (i'm scared it can't read mac floppies but i don't know)

 

[hantsbay]

Re the speed issue, this is a 90MHz PowerPC 601 - one of the earlier PowerPC chips from 1995/96, so it will definitely struggle with OS 9 (having shipped with System 7.5.2).

I remember because I also had one of these and tried the same thing!

OS 9 was rarely lightning fast on anything pre-G3 to be honest.

 

[Lil Chillbil]

The only thing I can think of doing for this old machine is maxing out the ram
to 512mb using 4 128mb sticks of ram
then try it on 9.1 and it should be just fine

a larger harddrive will also help but not with speed

 

[pacmania1982]

Re the speed issue, this is a 90MHz PowerPC 601 - one of the earlier PowerPC chips from 1995/96, so it will definitely struggle with OS 9 (having shipped with System 7.5.2).

I remember because I also had one of these and tried the same thing!

OS 9 was rarely lightning fast on anything pre-G3 to be honest.

I had one back in the day. I bought Mac OS 8.5. I found 8.5 struggled on it. I couldn't upgrade to 8.6 as it required 24MB of physical RAM. A few months later I got a blueberry iMac DV 400

Have you tried Mac OS 8.1 on it?

 

[havokalien]

Faster

Ram and os 8.1 are both great ideas for the machine. If you don't wanna change anything else I would say a cheap pci video card will speed it up as I just did that for a friend. Best upgrade path though to keep the case is a 7300 or up motherboard as it slaps right in and processor upgrades are cheap up to g4 on eBay.

Good luck

 

[robivy64]

For the squeaking: You might want to consider changing the capacitors on the motherboard and/or power supply.

I had an old Fujitsu FM Towns PC that made a high-decibel noise while powered on, and one of the capacitors in the power supply had failed.