Feed
 

New and lost :)

Avatar Glenn Wellstead
Hi ladies & gents,

I'm new here so thought I would introduce myself before I asked a couple of questions.

I'm Glenn and I'm 36 from West Moors near Ferndown. I'm medically retired due to my severe haemophilia factor XIII deficiency ( very rare ) and due to this I also get spontaneous internal bleeds ( into joints, tissue etc ) which has caused alot of problems for me ( L3-L4 prolapse and T4-T5 displaced ) so as you can imagine computers and the Internet have been a sanity saver :)

For about 15 years I have owned various pc's and before I was medically retired I used to help out at a pc shop doing repairs etc. I have never had a mac but was always facinated by the them and us mentality between windows and mac lovers.

Just recently I bought a secondhand Powermac G4 400mhz, 128mb ram, 80 gig hd, zipdrive, 32mb agp graphics card for £40. The reason being I recently bought an Apple Iphone and loved the clean simple look.I Was also amazed at safari.

So my question... The 400 MHz cpu. What would this equate to in windows of terms?

Also its running OsX 10.4.11 ( Tiger I believe )( I just updated it ) but it didnt come with any discs at all. How much would I be looking to pay for a set of discs should the os have a major wobbly?

Connecting to my wifi? What would be required to connect to my wifi router? I'm thinking a usb wifi dongle???

Leopard? Would this run on my G4? Or is it the case that the costs to upgrade it ( internal parts ) would not be worth doing to run leopard? I'm hoping ( one day ) to eventually get a better spec mac once I have learned how to operate it ( possibly one of the laptop looking ones as I spend alot of time in bed resting bleeds)

Also I just wondered if anyone has an Idiots guide to mac that they no longer use that I could purchase cheaply.

Many thanks for all replies.

Best wish's Glenn.






Sent using my O2 1.1.4 jailbroken Iphone

Re: New and lost :)

Avatar John Surtees
Hi Glen,

I have one or two books covering OSX Tiger and the Mac in general, that I'd be happy to pass on to you. I don't want anything for them. Sorry to be ignorant of your medical condition, but does it prevent you getting out? If not, and you able to get along to the Bournemouth WAG's meeting on Tuesday, I could let you have the books then.

I would give up any thought of Leopard as it only comes on DVD. If you are able to run Tiger, rather than bother about any system disks, I would buy an external Firewire HD and clone your system with SuperDuper. Then you'll always have a system boot disk, should the worst happen.

As for connection to your router, can you not just run an ethernet cable?

Depending on what you want to do, I think it would be wise to up your memory a little. See:
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/listparts.aspx?model=Power%20Mac%20G4%20%28350%2C%20400%2C%20450%2C%20and%20500MHz%29

Regards

John

Re: New and lost :)

Avatar Eleanor Spenceley
Hi Glen,

It appears a G4 400 would be about equivalent to a Pentium III running at 750 Mhz.
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G4ZONE/photoshop_1GHzPCvsG4.html

Mind you, given your G4 memory has only 128 Mb, I would expect running Mac OS X 10.4 would be _very_ slow indeed!
You would notice a major speed improvement if you ran 10.4 at least 512 MB or above. I agree with John (above) Crucial is the place to purchase memory.

ebay is selling proper 10.4 disks for around £50-£60!

I find dongles requiring drivers to be problematic, especially around OS upgrades.
The best option to run WIFI would be to look for an old Airport card 802.11b (not the extreme) which sell for around £25 these days. Alternatively look for a WIFI 'node' with an Ethernet link these will deliver connectivity without the need for drivers. I know DLink sell them, Apple sell the expensive Airport Express which can do the same thing (amongst other things!).

People have run Leopard on machines slower than the supported minimum of 867 Mhz, I have done so on an old iMac 800 Mhz, however there are problems of the graphics cards requiring at least 64 MB video RAM. Like you I have only 32 MB VRAM and there are too many issues to run it everyday.

Regards,

Martin

 
Feed