control, shift, cheeseburger

Yes, I am back. I have a new (old) Mac to use while I save up for a new iMac.

I bought it from a guy who lived near UCLA. He was more concerned that it get a good home than making any money on it, so we agreed that $75 was a fair price. It specs out thus:

G4 “Sawtooth” with AGP video card.
400 MHz G4 processor
1 60 GB and 1 10 GB hard drive
768 MB of RAM
Hitachi DVD-ROM
16 MB ATI AGP video card

As it was, this Mac is plenty speedy, the original owner upgraded it to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and ran all firmware and system updates. But of course, I have needs.

The first thing I noticed was that the Hitachi DVD drive was incapable of booting the Mac. Put a bootable disc in the drive, restart, hold the “C” key on the keyboard and the Mac should boot from the disc. Anytime I tried that with the Hitachi, it would kick the disk out. This is bad news, especially if you need to troubleshoot in the future.

The solution: the Pioneer DVD burner (model D110-DV) in my PC was not operating properly (it could not access disks even though Windows reported a disc in the drive) so I pulled it from the PC, and installed it into the Mac. The problem; this was a drive that is not mentioned in Apple’s list of compatible drives. I got some information from a couple of forums, one stating it worked out of the box, the other saying you needed to flash the firmware on the drive to its latest version. I had already done that in the attempt to fix it for Windows, so I installed it and ran the Apple System Profiler. Much to my relief, ASP said that the drive was “Apple shipped, Apple installed.” That means it is bootable and disk burning is supported in The Finder. Also, Toast seems to like it too.

That done, it was time to turn to processor and video. 768 RAM is OK but I needed a faster processor. Better video couldn’t hoit either.

I decided to turn to the good folks at Other World Computing and get a new Powerlogix 1.4 GHz processor upgrade card and an ATI Radeon 9200 PCI graphics card with 128 MB of RAM. These would cost me a total of $300 dollars and I would have to order them when I could pay for them, which was last payday. I received them yesterday and I installed them.

The video card was a piece of cake to install. Simply remove the old video card and install the new one in any available PCI slot (I thought I had ordered an AGP version). Once that was accomplished, I hooked ‘er backup and installed the RADEON software from ATI’s Web site (it came with a disk, but you can always find the latest version of software online). Once installed and rebooted, I noticed peppier performance, even from the 400 MHz native processor.

The processor, however, was not a joy of installation. I had a computer with all ducks in a row-the right OS, the right firmaware, etc. I put that card in and out of the computer 4 times and every time it failed to boot the computer. I went to bed finally at 1 AM. Then, I was awakened at 6 AM by my alarm with a raging sinus headache. I got on the phone and called OWC and told them I wanted to return this unworking card. The tech asked if I had applied the firmware update from the enclosed CD. “Firmware update?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. Do this, this and this and you will be able to install the new processor.

I did this, this and this (it wasn’t easy because I didn’t write down what he said) but finally I managed to flash my Mac and install the card. My only entreaty to OWC is please, please, please, make sure you include those instructions on how to perform the flash update in future versions of any instruction manual you send with a Powerlogix processor.

Filed under: Apple