My First Mac (freebie edition)

Well the other day at work someone gave me an old Power Mac G4 for free. Now when I say old I mean OLD! This thing has got to be like 10 years old or something. But hey it's mainly just for fun and it will give me a chance to play around with OSX a little more. That is assuming it has OSX on it!

Let's take a look at the machine, find out exactly what's inside and if it even works at all!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Power
• Mac
• G4
• 400MHZ
• ATi
• Rage
• 128
• Apple
• OSX

[maddmaxstar]

I got 3 questions for you:

1: What version of Mac OSX? 10.2, 10.3?

2: What version of Flash Player are you using for Youtube to be running that smooth in Early 2011? I just got a PowerMac G4 (a bit newer, 2002 QuickSilver model with a 933MHz G4), and the videos are chunky.

3: What is the hard drive type on the Mac? Is it a UltraWide SCSI or is it standard 40pin IDE PATA? If it's IDE then you should be able to pop in a larger drive and install MacOSX to it (a backup of a Mac install CD may work)

[MN12BIRD]

@maddmaxstar It's just a standard IDE drive and yeah I think I just got lucky with that video. It happened to be the first vid on YT I tried and it was okay but most others are much slower.

[border205]

why do you keep bagging the mac out, we know that it old and is not comparable to today's computers, but today's computers in another 10 years will be shit also.

[MN12BIRD]

@border205 I never once made fun of the Mac in this video. Not once. In fact what I did do was say several times how fast it was for a 450MHZ machine! Yeah it's 10 years old, that's old in the computer world. I know that and so do you. So I wasn't making fun of it I was actually excited to get this for free and discover it worked for the first time.

[border205]

@MN12BIRD I was not having a go at you, and yes it did load up youtube pretty fast for a 450MHZ machine.

[MN12BIRD]

@border205 Naw it's cool just a few people said I was hating on Macs in this video for some reason. I think this is an amazing machine for its age. Sure I was joking about the age (like the fact the video card has 16MB) but I would have done the exact same thing if it was a PC!

[poodletteldoop]

I just got 2 Power Macintosh G5 computers which I found next to a dumpster. One I have tested and It works pretty well. The only problem is that it won't recognize my WD Caviar Blue 250 Gig SATA Drive.

[winlover37]

You got one for free too? My grandmother had an old G4 Cube and just gave it to me since she got a new Mac laptop. I forget what OS it has but it's a fairly old one. A bunch of old computers circulate throughout my house. But my dad had to throw some away including an old old Tandy! -:(

[boltorano]

My first two years of college, circa 2002-2004, it was still sort of a requirement to have at least one zip disk if you wanted to move your files around between lab computers. Not all of the computers had CD burners yet and network storage / online file storage options were a lot smaller/fewer than there are today. This was at a $15k/year school with a very large computer science / IT program and they rotated the PCs out of the labs every 2 years or so.

[RusticoShow]

How to change MAC OS language from chinese to English

Hi my name is Rustico I'm a Filipino I used to work in China, as a contract worker, when my contracts end my chinese boss gave an MAC OS, I went back to the Philippines and now my problem is the language of my MAC is Chinese, I forgot to ask him to translate to English language. I need your help MN12BIRD.. Can you please teach me how to change MAC OS chinese language to English.

Thank You and I'm looking forward for your response.

[sonic3243]

That's crazy! But the performance is expected because it's running an older OS 10 with 512MB RAM.

Well, my Gateway 450 with a Pentium 3 450MHz, 128MB RAM, and 12MB Voodoo3 can handle YouTube videos fine at 240p and 360p, and it can run Firefox 4 in Windows 98 (KernelEx).

[crazzer123]

Ahh still making good videos :) also to make the screen larger you click the yellow button i think. on the top left of the internet browser

[psp12345678998765432]

I have a Power Mac G3 thats 200 MHz and 128 MB of ram, it can run OS X. But I have OS 9.1 on it. Because I wanted to study the OS, not my best choice hint no C compiler or command line interface.

[maddmaxstar]

@MN12BIRD I figured I'd ask, the version of OSX is just a curiousity. IDE drive, it'll use a PC hard drive as long as it's 120gb or less, if you have an extra one - just did it to mine today. Maximum OS for that Mac is probably 10.4 Tiger if you know someone with a copy, but it would turn the Mac into a somewhat usable machine.

As for Youtube, I find it runs choppy in anything other than 240p. Apparently that's the norm for older Macs now. Even so, it's an awesome 'puter for the collection.