My first ever Apple II!

[Alex Taylor <astravan@thresp.com>]

I thought I'd share with everyone my experiences of my first ever Apple 
II, and I have a few questions along the way.

I've had collections of just about everything else, including very large 
quantities of Macs, Acorns (8 and 32 bit), Sinclairs, and odd stuff like 
Dragons and Aquarius. My favourite 8-bit computer is probably the 8-bit 
Acorn range (Electron/BBC/Master), since that's what I'd grown up with 
at school. Until recently I'd never had an Apple II, a computer that I'd 
been curious about for years, since it's almost like the US equivalent 
of the BBC computer here. I'd often regretted not buying the II europlus 
I'd seen for sale about 10 years ago at a car boot sale - I'd never seen 
another cheap one for sale since. Until I took some old carpet down to 
the local tip, and came across a IIe with with Disk II drives, which I 
took away for the sum of 5 UKP!

First experiences were that I'd not noticed that the '4' key was 
missing, and the 'Q' key is a bit broken. First question: does anybody, 
preferably in the UK, have a spare keyboard or keyboard parts so I can 
fix these?

Second experience: within a few minutes of switch-on, the large yellow 
filter capacitor in the PSU blew up. The machine still worked fine, but 
it really did smell. So I replaced it and the smaller one nearby. This 
was probably due to the machine being in storage for a long time (it's 
very dusty). I once had a Triumph-Adler Alphatronic do the same thing to me.

Since then, another capacitor seems to have failed since it now takes 
about 10 attempts to switch it on. Thanks very much for the FAQ, 
otherwise I'd never have known what was wrong with it!

I took a look inside for cards, it's got an Extended 80 column card, a 
Super Serial Card, an RGB card, and obviously the Disk card. I 
reconfigured the serial card, and after finding the information, copied 
over DOS 3.3 and ADT. I've since been busy copying over ProDOS 1.1.1, 
AppleWriter II, Apple Access II, and various other disk images including 
some games. Another question: I'd like to get ProDOS 1.9 for it, but I 
can only find 800K images. Does anybody have a 140K image for ProDOS 1.9?

Some more questions: I've got it hooked up to a Philips CM8833-II 
monitor using the composite input. How do I get colour on the screen? I 
can only seem to get monochrome. And what is the small rocker switch on 
the front lower part of the case?

Thanks very much to anybody who can give me any more help. I've learned 
loads about the Apple II over the past couple of weeks and I'd really 
like to put it to some practical use!

--
Alex Taylor