The last three days have been spent with my new Macs. One is a ~2000 G4 500 MHz Cube for a quiet personal machine. The other is a ~2001 Digital Audio Power Mac for a file server. I wanted to see if old Macs would suit my needs and see how cheaply I can get things done.
The Cube was slightly expensive $350 and the Power Mac was $180. More memory, 3 sticks of 512 meg @ $110, was ordered to help fill out and run OS X 10.4. Also, a replacement hard drive for the Power Mac to ensure reliability @ $45. And a USB 2 card for $30. Neither machine came with 10.4 and my install disks are for Intel machines. So, I got a copy of 10.3 with upgrade to 10.4 for $180. That was a little expensive.
So, the whole project adds up to $900 for two computers with about $320 in capital costs for all computers. No need to buy another copy of 10.3, the USB 2 card and memory can work in lots of computers.
Turns out that I have lots of PC100 and PC133 memory. Unfortunately, the last 256 meg stick went in to Adam’s computer and most of it is 64 and 128 meg sticks.
My first impressions were that both computers are impressive. The Power Mac is exceptionally quiet, which is something I couldn’t have predicted and is very much appreciated. The cube has a high pitched whine from a user installed fan or perhaps the hard drive. The speed is generally acceptable. The Power Mac feels a little faster and it should. The Front Side Bus is 33% faster and the CPU is slightly faster.
The Power Mac has been setup twice and is on it’s third right now. 10.4 causes problems on boot up. The symptoms might indicate a bad logic board or memory. Since, 10.3 will do everything I need and doesn’t make the system unstable I’m installing it. Hopefully, the never ending process of install and update will finish soon.
The Cube is a little more disappointing. The noise is very annoying and the silence was the reason buying the cube. The speed is a little low for Firefox. More than 3 tabs start to really slow it down. I’m a bit of a multitasking whore. This is going to drive me nuts. I ordered a Mac flashed GeForce 6200 256 meg video card and I’ll probably upgrade with the speed tripling 1.5 GHz processor. Hopefully, this will put me off of upgrading computers until the quad core MacBook Pros come out next year and the new MacBook Pro issues are worked through.
Both computers look good, are relatively quite, fairly responsive, and quite usable. Looking back at when I last used my PC133 memory; I must have chucked all those boxes at least 3 years ago and maybe 5. I’m pleased with them.