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New life for old Macs

#1 User is offline   Macworld Icon

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Posted 30 July 2008 - 03:21 PM

Post your comments for New life for old Macs here
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#2 User is offline   ndchan Icon

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Posted 30 July 2008 - 06:53 PM

A Mac that is capable of running Leopard does not mean you can run Boot Camp. It is more important that the Mac is from the Intel generation product line.
Do Intel Mac qualify as old?
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#3 User is offline   ndutyme Icon

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Posted 30 July 2008 - 07:26 PM

I second that ndchan, Leopard does not equal Boot Camp.
I am pushing it running Leopard on a PowerMac G4 733!
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#4 User is offline   bvid Icon

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Posted 31 July 2008 - 02:20 AM

I quote from Apple's support article entitled 'Installing Windows XP or Windows Vista on Your Mac':
'To install and set up Windows on your Mac, you’ll need:
An Intel-based Mac computer, with the latest firmware updates installed'
Looks like that's not going to work!
Too Bad.
Bvid
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#5 User is offline   rtroiani Icon

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Posted 31 July 2008 - 02:40 AM

ColdFusion has an OS X install, so doing boot camp is not necessary. Same for Flex Builder.
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#6 User is offline   flybynight Icon

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Posted 31 July 2008 - 05:28 AM

>I am pushing it running Leopard on a PowerMac G4 733!
Technically, you are outside of supported hardware for Leopard - it's only supposed to install on a machine with an 867MHz or faster processor. More power to you!
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#7 User is offline   tfrogh Icon

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Posted 31 July 2008 - 06:46 AM

Well, some macs will fetch you a good price on Craigslist. Depends on your Config. G4 Towers are not the strongest sellers but G4 and G5 iMacs and G5 towers still command a good price here in MD.
That say, I have a G4 iMac that I keep for making into a public machine in the house. I don't want people on my Mac Mini. Also, with an Airport Express, I can use the G4 iMac for sending tunes to the stereo when company comes over. That design STILL gets ooohs and aaahs from people.
Lastly, as a friend of Mac people, I keep old machines around in the basement as parts machines. I get a lot of love and free dinners/lunches when I can pull a power supply or optical drive out of thin air when someone is in desperate need. No, a Yosemite G3 is not a modern machine, but for web and word processing it is just fine. How many 10 year old PCs can still be a viable machine for day to day use?
I have a Yosemite G3, WELL upgraded that I could just not part with. I kept him tucked away in the basement. Good thing I did. A dear friend and his wife split and my friend ended up with very little as he moved out. He has been very grateful that in his darkest hour I was there to "loan" him a working computer. 2 years later with his life stabilized. he still uses it. I have since acquired 2 more Yosemite machine as parts units. I expect that my machine will be in service for a few more years. At least as long as the web accepts the version of Firefox on it.
That is probably the best use for an old machine. Helping someone in real need.
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#8 User is offline   macFanDave Icon

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Posted 31 July 2008 - 07:24 AM

ndchan said:

A Mac that is capable of running Leopard does not mean you can run Boot Camp. It is more important that the Mac is from the Intel generation product line.

Do Intel Mac qualify as old?


Well, in the matter of human age we are saying things like "50 is the new 40." Maybe, Mr. Dempsey thinks that for Macs, "2 is the new 7." ;)
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#9 User is offline   rexsim Icon

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Posted 31 July 2008 - 08:58 AM

I have a G4 iBook that recently had the screen fail....most likely a broken connection or something. Everything else seemed to work fine. As I didn't want to spend a lot to have a new screen installed, I thought I would purchase an inexpensive 19 inch LCD monitor to hook it up to. I have had laptops for so long, the last external monitor I owned was an Apple 13 inch tube model ( I forget now what they called it)
With a cordless keyboard and mouse, it is now enjoying a second life as a desktop computer, and I am certainly enjoying the bigger, easier to see screen.
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#10 User is offline   TiggerToo Icon

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Posted 31 July 2008 - 09:38 AM

"If you’re in the graphic design business, you probably have a ton of fonts. If you use more than one Mac (for example, I use a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro, and an old G5), you’ll certainly need to make sure you have all the same fonts on every machine."
Photoshop runs like crap with 700 fonts on a local machine (on a brand new 4gb loaded iMac) just imagine how crap it would be running 2,000 fonts from G4 running over ethernet or wifi, shudder to think!
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#11 User is offline   tericoid Icon

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Posted 31 July 2008 - 12:14 PM

Believe it or not, I still have a fully functional Indego iMac G3 350Mhz! I recently purchased an X-Arcade dual controller, downloaded MacMAME, Stella and a bunch of ROMs and has turned it into a classic arcade machine.
I put it in the basement and have my family and old friends come by and relive our youth playing the old Street Fighter down to Pac-Man and Centipede!
If you can't part with your old machines and it still works but not good enough to do anything good with it, turn a retro machine into a retro machine and have fun!
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#12 User is offline   bronwyn Icon

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Posted 31 July 2008 - 02:56 PM

I have a G4 iMac in my kitchen. It's ideal for keeping recipe software on, and the adjustable screen is perfect for reading recipes while standing up cooking. Much better than my old way of doing things, which involved printing from the main computer and a messy collection of dead tree in a folder in the kitchen.
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#13 User is offline   aestival Icon

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Posted 31 July 2008 - 03:25 PM

Um... OS X Server v10.4? -- how in the world does that not rate when something as useless as a $1400 "font server" rates number one?!?

I mean, if you're planning to waste $1400 to serve a block of ten computers, then get OS X Server 10.4 and set up file sharing with a folder containing all of your fonts. That leaves you $900 to waste on actual fonts. Duh.
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#14 User is offline   James_Dempsey Icon

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Posted 01 August 2008 - 09:52 AM

aestival:

In the original version of this article, I had mentioned a file server setup, I'm not sure why it was edited out. That being said, there is no #1 in this list, because I wasn't "rating" them, just listing some things you could do.

As far as a font server being useless, I don't think you understand what a font server does, so I won't comment on it further other than to say that I know a lot of ad agencies, design firms and publications that disagree with you.
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