So, I’ve got a couple new computers…
Annoyingly, the first one I bought wasn’t the first one I received. Frickin SLOW eBay sellers…
So, we’ll start with the first one I actually got.
I decided to play around with OS X, and… obtained… a certain well-known x86 PC copy to install on my ThinkPad (an X61 Tablet.) Unfortunately, we’ll just say that it didn’t go well. (Seems the driver support is rather poor…)
So, I decided to just do the right thing, and buy a real Mac. I looked on eBay, and saw a cheap iBook 12″ G4 1.2GHz. It ended up going for $350, and that was with a 1GB RAM upgrade. From my research, that model normally sells for $500. The only problem? The hard drive was making a noise.
Oh, a very horrible noise. But, it worked fine for over a week – during which I ordered Leopard and a 160GB hard drive. 🙂
(Oh, and if you ever intend on doing an iBook hard drive replacement… don’t. Just don’t. And if you ignore THAT advice… follow the iFixit directions to the letter, in the exact order that they are presented, especially the ones regarding the metal rings on the bottom of the iBook. Seriously.)
Anyway, I’m loving it. It’s a BIT sluggish, but you wouldn’t expect that the machine’s three years old, and was released four years ago. XP machines from a similar time, with similar amounts of RAM make this thing look like a super computer. (Oh, wait, it legally IS. Then again, so was everything else from then…)
Now… for the other machine.
It’s a bit… how shall I say this… older. But it’s also an Apple.
It’s an Apple IIGS. This particular one is a ROM 03 system. Right now, I just have the monitor, an Apple Extended Keyboard II, a mouse, two Apple 5.25s, and two Apple 3.5s. However, that’s enough to hook it to my ThinkPad, and use ANSITerm on the GS and TCPSer4J on the ThinkPad, to telnet into stuff at a BLAZING FAST 38400 bps. 😆 In fact, I’m posting this entry using the GS. (Some editing will be done on the iBook, though.)
Future plans for it are some form of mass storage (using CompactFlash cards,) either a 4MB or an 8MB RAM upgrade, and a Uther ethernet card from A2Retrosystems. This machine will eventually be a web server, in fact.
Oh, and not that anyone’s paying attention, but I’m going to mess around with the tags. I don’t like some of them, and I need to get icons anyway.