"If it seems too easy, you're not trying hard enough." Part 4: Computers
Again, sorry for the delay. Again, things have been quite busy, with me working five days a week at the convenience store. Anyway, on with the show.
For a couple of years, I made do with a Sony Vaio laptop. While it ran fairly well, I had a friend who was a Mac fan, and had long extolled the virtues of the Mac over the PC. For several years, the only Macs I could come up with were far too old to be of any use in today's world, lacking features that people take for granted nowadays (ethernet, processor speed, even color graphics...). Then, in July, I struck quasi-gold: I found a vintage PowerMac G3 (beige version) at a flea market for all of $10.
I took it home, and discovered that it worked fairly well. I attempted to install OS X 10.2 onto it, which it was supposed to be compatible with. However, much to my chagrin, it absolutely refused to boot from the install CD. I ended up using a program called XPostFacto, which was meant to be used to install versions of OS X on computers not made to be able to use them, and got 10.2 installed onto it (attempted to update it to 10.2.8, but that caused a video issue, so I reformatted and went with 10.2.6, an earlier version, instead). As I've learned since, the beige version of the PowerMac G3 (as opposed to the iMac-like blue & white version) is extremely picky about running OS X. I have since acquired another beige PowerMac G3, and it too was highly recalcitrant towards installing OS X 10.2 (even though it had had it installed before the hard drive was reformatted).
About two months later, luck then struck again. While at a yard sale, I spotted a green iMac G3 DV with a price tag of, you guessed it, $10. The hard drive seemed to be dead, as did the internal video screen, but I figured that it'd be worth at least that much for the parts alone, so I went for it. After viewing this page, I discovered that attempting to install OS X onto an iMac G3 without updating the firmware to 4.1.9 can cause screen blanking.
I connected a monitor to the VGA port on the back of my iMac (only iMac G3 DVs came with the VGA port, so I consider myself lucky), which came up with working video, proving that the firmware was likely the problem. I managed to get the old internal hard drive working to a small degree, installed a clean version of OS 9.1 onto it, ran the firmware update, and voila! The internal monitor came back to life. I then replaced the old hard drive with a larger one, installed OS X 10.3 on it, and it is serving me well to this day (though the video tends to be a bit unstable).
I use the iMac for most purposes, but it is too slow for graphics-intensive operations. Hopefully, I will get a newer Mac one of these days, and will finally be able to put the laptop fully behind me. I am considering the Mac mini, as well as the iBook line, but I will be waiting until after the January 10th keynote speech at MacWorld San Francisco to see what sort of changes, if any, will be taking place in the low-end Mac lines.
-Adam
For a couple of years, I made do with a Sony Vaio laptop. While it ran fairly well, I had a friend who was a Mac fan, and had long extolled the virtues of the Mac over the PC. For several years, the only Macs I could come up with were far too old to be of any use in today's world, lacking features that people take for granted nowadays (ethernet, processor speed, even color graphics...). Then, in July, I struck quasi-gold: I found a vintage PowerMac G3 (beige version) at a flea market for all of $10.
I took it home, and discovered that it worked fairly well. I attempted to install OS X 10.2 onto it, which it was supposed to be compatible with. However, much to my chagrin, it absolutely refused to boot from the install CD. I ended up using a program called XPostFacto, which was meant to be used to install versions of OS X on computers not made to be able to use them, and got 10.2 installed onto it (attempted to update it to 10.2.8, but that caused a video issue, so I reformatted and went with 10.2.6, an earlier version, instead). As I've learned since, the beige version of the PowerMac G3 (as opposed to the iMac-like blue & white version) is extremely picky about running OS X. I have since acquired another beige PowerMac G3, and it too was highly recalcitrant towards installing OS X 10.2 (even though it had had it installed before the hard drive was reformatted).
About two months later, luck then struck again. While at a yard sale, I spotted a green iMac G3 DV with a price tag of, you guessed it, $10. The hard drive seemed to be dead, as did the internal video screen, but I figured that it'd be worth at least that much for the parts alone, so I went for it. After viewing this page, I discovered that attempting to install OS X onto an iMac G3 without updating the firmware to 4.1.9 can cause screen blanking.
I connected a monitor to the VGA port on the back of my iMac (only iMac G3 DVs came with the VGA port, so I consider myself lucky), which came up with working video, proving that the firmware was likely the problem. I managed to get the old internal hard drive working to a small degree, installed a clean version of OS 9.1 onto it, ran the firmware update, and voila! The internal monitor came back to life. I then replaced the old hard drive with a larger one, installed OS X 10.3 on it, and it is serving me well to this day (though the video tends to be a bit unstable).
I use the iMac for most purposes, but it is too slow for graphics-intensive operations. Hopefully, I will get a newer Mac one of these days, and will finally be able to put the laptop fully behind me. I am considering the Mac mini, as well as the iBook line, but I will be waiting until after the January 10th keynote speech at MacWorld San Francisco to see what sort of changes, if any, will be taking place in the low-end Mac lines.
-Adam
posted by Adam Vaughn at 2:45 AM
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