I have a Personal Laserwriter NT. I am thinking about upgrading the logic board to an NTR, since they are cheap on ebay, for two main reasons. Firstly, the NTR has Postscript Level 2 support, which is required to use it with Mac OS X, and secondly I understand that the upgrade would make the printer significantly faster, as it currently is very slow processing graphics and the like. If this is the case it would be very useful for me. (Or is it simply a speed limit of Localtalk?)
However, the NTR board only has a max RAM of 4mb, while my NT board has the full 8mb installed. Would 4mb make the printer worse for anything compared to the 8mb on the NT? Why did they only allow the max to be such a low amount?
Could anyone comment whether the speed of the board is significantly faster? The NT uses a 12MHz 68000 chip, and the NTR uses a 16MHz AMD 29005 chip.
Would PS level 2 improve anything over level 1, apart from OS X support?
Finally what kind of 2MB SIMM would be used to upgrade the NTR from 3MB to 4MB - could I use a standard 4mb 72-pin edo simm (assuming it would only access the first 4mb anyway), or do I need custom Apple RAM?
Thanks
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by Stephen (1/21/02 5:49 PM) reply
Your situation is exacly like mine, except I am a year behind you. Did you get your answers? If so, have you done the upgrade? And if so, exactly what parts need to be replaced?
Thanks for any help and advice.
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by Craigwd_2000 (1/7/07 8:57 AM) reply
I have a Personal LaserWriter NTR. I also tried to max out its RAM with a four MB 72 pin RAM Simm. It's incompatible. Apparently you have to try & find a proprietary two MB 72 pin RAM Simm made specifically for printers.
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by moe (1/7/07 10:19 AM) reply
I just recently found a 72 pin 2 MB stick of printer RAM. I knew it was printer RAM because I looked up the numbers in the Chipmunk RAM Guide. They IDed it as a 2 MB module but some of the markings on the module weren't in the RAM Guide. That's why I think it's printer RAM & not computer RAM. I have already installed it on the IO Board/Logic Board of my Personal LaserWriter NTR. I'm still having issues with the printer though. So far I've replaced the scanner motor, density control board & the pickup rollers. Whenever the printer is turned on none of the status lights light up/cycle. I've tried to print to it from a Mac but I keep getting errors about my Mac being unable to switch AppleTalk to the printer port. I've also tried printing to it from a Deskpro 6000 running Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 4. I got a device not connected error when I tried to print a test page after adding the printer to the Printers folder. What should I try to replace next?
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by moe (5/15/07 5:47 PM) reply
Seems like you have a bad formatter. The engine test checks everything but the formatter and if it doesn't do a config page, that's generated out of the formatter.
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by Craigwd_2000 (edited 5/16/07 5:17 PM) reply
Is formatter another name for the IO Board/Logic Board? I'd also like to know where I could buy one or if you'd be willing to sell me one. I already looked on eBay but nobody seems to have one for my printer.
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by moe (5/16/07 6:08 PM) reply
I believe I have a couple of NTR boards. They're called a lot of different names, i/o, logic board, formatter, rip etc. email me for price and shipping info. You click on my name to do so.
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by Craigwd_2000 (8/12/07 7:27 PM) reply
I just installed the replacement IO Board in my Personal LaserWriter NTR & it printed a configuration page. I'm looking to buy the optional paper cassette base. Do you happen to have any in stock? If so how much would it cost? I'm asking about cost because it's not listed in your parts inventory anywhere.
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by moe (8/12/07 9:24 PM) reply
I just hooked up the printer to my '12 PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz with Combo Drive. The PowerBook is running Mac OS X 10.4.10. I have installed the Foomatic-RIP, ESP Ghostscript & the HP Open Source Hpljs drivers. The printer is hooked up via a USB to parallel converter cable. The printout quality is very low. I suspect the printer is set to PostScript mode but the HP drivers are talking to it in PCL mode. What's the selector switch setting for LocalTalk PostScript, Serial 9600 & PCL emulation for the Centronics connector?
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by moe (8/22/07 11:38 AM) reply
Why are you using HP drivers? Why aren't you using Apple drivers or generic post script drivers? If you select the switch to "4" and power up the printer, it will give you a config page that shows the settings for that switch.
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by Craigwd_2000 (edited 8/22/07 12:19 PM) reply
The Apple driver is incompatible with the USB to parallel converter cable. I can't figure out the URI the Apple driver needs to communicate with the printer. Is there a Terminal command I can use to determine the printer's URI?
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by moe (8/22/07 12:46 PM) reply
I don't know what you are expecting in terms of printout quality, but it's only a 300dpi engine. Compared to today's 1200dpi engines, it's going to look awful, not to mention the extremely slow printing. Why don't you just update to a newer printer?
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by Craigwd_2000 (edited 8/22/07 12:58 PM) reply
I had it working fine before. I just want to be able to fix it so it works again. I'm getting big gray lines on the config page when it prints. Do you think something may be wrong with the fuser?
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by moe (8/22/07 1:09 PM) reply
I read in the service manual for my printer that there's a ROM Upgrade Kit available for it that I don't have installed. It's supposed to fix the blank page printing & the PostScript errors I'm getting when printing from my iMac G5 1.8 GHz with Super Drive with two GB of RAM. My ROMs are the older outdated ones. Do you have the Personal LaserWriter NTR ROM Upgrade Kit in stock Moe? If so how much would it cost?
Re: Personal Laserwriter logic boards by moe (10/13/07 5:46 PM) reply
According to the Apple Service manual for the printer the Rev 4.0 Personal LaserWriter NTR ROMs are identified by their part numbers. The part numbers are 341-0950, 341-0951, 341-0952, 341-0953, 341-0954 & 341-0955. If you want to make things easy you could just read off the letter revision or copyright date on the IO Boards/Logic Boards. The one that originally came with my printer was a Revision K whereas the one you sent me was a Revision H. What Revision markings are on your two remaining IO Boards? If one of the two is a Revision K or higher I might be interested in buying it.
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