It’s back from the grave and ready to party!
Sunday after about 4pm is "Craig Time" - from 4pm until I fall asleep, I get to stop being a dad, a husband, a manager, an employee. I'm "just Craig", and "Craig Time" is a lot like "Hammer Time", only different. I usually fiddle with something - hardware, software, media stuff, it's hard to say - but the theme is always "fiddle".
Tonight's fiddle project was to see if I could bring my Power Mac G4 from the year 2000 back to life. Turns out all it needed was a little cable wiggling - it had been moved from Redmond to Bellevue to Great Falls, VA back to Redmond and I guess something came loose along the way.
I hadn't done an OS upgrade on my Power Mac since I upgraded OS 9 to OS X 10.1 WAAAAYYY back. It had a decent amount of hard disk space - the boot drive was 36GB, plus it had a 74GB second drive, both SCSI and 10,000 RPM - I spared no expense back in 2000 to make my dream video editing machine. But the drives were cluttered with a sea of crud, after futzing around forever trying to figure out what mattered and what didn't, I finally said "to heck with it" (in reality, I said something different, but this is a family friendly blog 
), and decided to clean install Tiger.
I am amazed how well it is performing - dual 500MHz PowerPC G4's aren't exactly up to par with the dual core 2.33GHz Intel proc in my new iMac at work, but it's not bad. And amazingly, I plugged my Power Mac into a spot where I had a Windows machine - and the video card from 2000 supported my 24" Dell monitor at 1920x1200 (albeit through a HD15 (VGA) cable, not DVI) and input mostly worked with a Microsoft mouse and keyboard (the mouse freezes a little from time to time). And as if hooking my poor ancient Power Mac up to a Dell display and Microsoft input hardware wasn't enough indignity, I also pulled two 256MB 133MHz SDRAM DIMMs out of an old Pentium III machine, and put them side by side with the two 256MB 100MHz SDRAM DIMMs that were in my Power Mac already - and it didn't halt and catch fire. So now I have a gig of RAM instead of a mere 512MB - Tiger seems to like it better that way.
My Y2K Power Mac G4 is back from the grave and ready to party!
Comments
I have the same family of machine - a single 400mhz G4 powermac gigabit ethernet.
Currently, it's a 1.33ghz G4, 1.5gb ram, usb2 pci card, firewire 800 pci card, and all sorts of hard drives attached. Oh, and a 8x dual layer dvd burner.
I loaned it to a friend who is more of a Windows / PC fellow. He was using it and said that it died on him, but he had diagnosed it and decided it was the power supply.
By the time I got over there, he had stripped every screw out of the machine and was holding the power supply victoriously.
I shook my head, reassembled it, pressed the PMU reset button on the motherboard, and it came alive. It needed a PRAM battery.
Which, after 7 years, isn't unreasonable.
Posted by: vmarks | June 22, 2007 6:39 AM
Okay, so the fact that you used that movie poster? That rules. 2nd Best Zombie Movie EVAR
Posted by: John C. Welch | June 23, 2007 6:45 AM
This movie was one of my favorites of all time - and the tagline "They're back from the grave and ready to party" has stuck in my head for over 20 years now.
Posted by: Craig Eisler | June 23, 2007 10:45 AM
"Send more cops"
Posted by: John C. Welch | June 24, 2007 6:37 PM