Reading Time: 2 minutesSaturday I got some writing down but the fact that Norton FileSaver kept nagging me didn’t sit right with me. I’ve used this software forever and it has never let me down so there must be something going on. Scanned the whole drive again, this time with Drive Genius, and again no bad block were found. Must be a mechanical issue of some kind then because games that should fly on this iMac just don’t run right. The testing done…
Reading Time: 3 minutesSpent most of the day out and about but once I got home it was upgrade and troubleshooting time. Greg T. was kind enough to send me 512MB of RAM for free. Along with the 512MB I had I could max this thing out at 1GB. Also ready were an AirPort card and new battery. The original 80GB HDD was having a few quirks but I left that in anyway. Upgrading the internals is easy in these things so the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesYup, I’m doing it. Later this week I will be firing up my 800MHz 17″ iMac G4 and use Mac OS 9.2.2 for as much of my computing as I possibly can. Why? I love Mac OS 9 (and 8.6). I can get almost anything I need to do done fast and distraction free. And of course it’s a lot of fun! Leading up to the start of this challenge I figured I’d share some of the issues and joys…
Reading Time: 4 minutesThis is a continuation of “Recapping an Xserve G5 power supply – Part 1 – Preparations” and “Recapping an Xserve G5 power supply – Part 2 – Recap and test” so read that first if you haven’t already I didn’t want to squeeze this into the previous articles and clutter them up, so here are some additional notes. First off, here is the pinout for the January 2005 G5 Xserve and G5 Xserve Cluster Node PSU: This is looking at…
Reading Time: 4 minutesThis is a continuation of “Recapping an Xserve G5 power supply – Part 1 – Preparations” so read that first if you haven’t already 🙂 Received some capacitors today! (Most up to date parts list available in Part 3, the list that follows is old and links may be broken) I put them all in place (not soldered) to see if I got the right sizes and here is the conclusion: 1. C111 – 1000uF, 16V – Perfect fit 2….
Reading Time: 5 minutesA few weeks ago I picked up a whole stack of Xserves. I had been looking for a first gen G4 Xserve which has the tray load optical drive instead of the slot load and the rest of them were believed to be all G5’s. Never having had a Cluster Node model either, I was happy to see 8 of them in the stack. The purpose of this was to make some cool videos for my YouTube channel. When I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesRecently on Mac Yak episode #11 (which unfortunately got horribly mangled by YouTube so it’s not easy to watch) the topic of Classic data preservation and transfer was brought up. The topic was “How to transfer files between old and new Macs” and got me thinking, how far back can we go to send files between different Macs and OS versions? What really is the best way to package this data to ensure it survives transfers to Windows PC’s, Linux…
Reading Time: 3 minutesYou’re about to meet a buyer that has the Mac you want. A quick power on test to see if it even fires up, a quick glance at the About This Mac and System Report.. hmm looks alright. You hand over the cash, take your new Mac home and find it’s not in as good of a state as you thought it was. There is a very easy test you can do to get a general idea of the overall…
Reading Time: 3 minutesDramatic headline isn’t it? Sure it’s probably clickbait but it’s the truth none the less. I’m talking about the application Activity Monitor. Years ago I got my hands on a switch that supported LAG (Link Aggregate), the ability to merge two ethernet ports together and get a considerable bandwidth boost. Not all LAG/LACP are the same and implementation standards even vary between manufacturers so some might use LAG as failover, others to get more bandwidth. My goal was of course,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesThe date is December 22nd, 2018 and my friend Michael goes out to pick up an iMac G5. $50, in good shape, nothing special. He’s wanted one for a while just to add to his collection and finally found one locally. He meets the seller which tells him he got this from a woman that used to work at Apple. Sure, whatever, he thinks. Just trying to justify the pricetag. Michael buys it, takes it home and thinks nothing of…