Hey All,
Long time reader, first time Poster.
The story begins During this school year, my brother stumbled upon the backroom to a whole nest of PowerPCs his high school were planning to recycle from various teachers. The computers sat there for over 6 months and my brother decided to bring a few pieces of the so called “Trash” home…
After returning from College, I encountered a room with old-school apple computers
1 MDD 1 GHz Dual Core Powermac g4
1 Apple Studio Display
1 Emac with a 15? Inch screen
1 IBook g3
after building my first computer for the first time this year and working at the college it department, I learn the importance of the definition of “dated Hardware” is usually not dated at all! So I took it upon myself (not having a summer job rocks) and gave the PowerPCs another Life.
After spending roughly 4 hours cleaning all the dirt and dust residing in the MDD, I polished the internal and external parts with car wax and clean the studio display. After cleaning it inside and out, I began noticing loud fans and slow performance. With little bit of money and time I started bringing the machine into the 21st century.
What Did I do to Speed up the MDD:
-Upgraded the ram from 192mb to Whopping 2 1gb DDR Ram (acquired from my now dead Sony Vaio PC) Cost: $0
-Opened up the power supply and clean out a handful of dust (Cools the Power supply down, extending the life) Cost: $0
-Cram in two new power-supply fans to replace the old pair (I believe this will hopefully be quieter) Cost 2*$10
-Installed the emac white fan and crafty have the fan powered by a Molex connector AND the old 120mm MB fan control. (Possibly overvolts the fan? But provides additional cooling capabilities!)
Cost: $0
replaced the obnoxious fan with a quieter fan (with blue leds! Eh, I like it) Found the unopened fan at a yard sale for $2.
Total cost of upgrade $22!
PROS:
-I can use Firefox 4 plus the extensions, Thanks tenfourfox!!!
-Download 800mb videos from streaming websites and watch smoothly on Mplayer or VLC!
-480P YouTube RUNS!
- Leopard Runs Extremely smooth on the MDD…No slowdowns at all…It actually runs YouTube 360p without any slowdowns, AWSOME
-Loving Calibre with 8000 E-books; that’s enough books to last me a lifetime! (Thanks Demonoid)
-It runs SNES emulator and Nintendo DS emulator with ease!
-Apple design execution and reliability for the parts is an A+ from me…The MDD looks Modern!
- Free! Another person trash is another person’s treasure!
Cons:
-The computer fans offer my eardrums with the spectacular “mmmmmmmmmmmm” sound, droning out all outside sounds
- I wouldn’t have to stream videos if only Netflix would make PowerPC compatible software….Why Netflix, WHYY!
-Research to find what last version of software that’s PowerPC compatible can be redundant and tiresome.
- The apple studio display option disappeared off display setting and clicking the button only offers a 2 second glow followed by nothing. (Any idea’s PowerPC Gurus??) So, after spending 3 hours searching forums (like apple.com) nobody has found a way to fix it, Thanks apple for not offering any solutions to over 40+ topics with the same issue!
-100 dollars for an ADC adapter…really apple?
-Why does PowerPC have to be a dead architecture? I’ve read they were pretty powerful and unique design.
-Hardware restrictions really do get cumbersome to remember, especially for video cards!
-Inflated Prices for this hardware is more of a gripe I have with resellers.
But hey, I am super happy there are communities like this one that still offers salvations for us PowerPC stranglers with awesome software and hardware suggestions and resources…The forum really encourages me to keep “ Being Different” and using this MDD over my own built window’s computer!
I would talk about the speed of a 500 MHz 192mb ram 10GB! Hard drive ibookg3 but that’s for another day
Thanks for the support guys and I wish you all luck to keep the PowerPC’s Truck’n.
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Long time reader, first time Poster.
The story begins During this school year, my brother stumbled upon the backroom to a whole nest of PowerPCs his high school were planning to recycle from various teachers. The computers sat there for over 6 months and my brother decided to bring a few pieces of the so called “Trash” home…
After returning from College, I encountered a room with old-school apple computers
1 MDD 1 GHz Dual Core Powermac g4
1 Apple Studio Display
1 Emac with a 15? Inch screen
1 IBook g3
after building my first computer for the first time this year and working at the college it department, I learn the importance of the definition of “dated Hardware” is usually not dated at all! So I took it upon myself (not having a summer job rocks) and gave the PowerPCs another Life.
After spending roughly 4 hours cleaning all the dirt and dust residing in the MDD, I polished the internal and external parts with car wax and clean the studio display. After cleaning it inside and out, I began noticing loud fans and slow performance. With little bit of money and time I started bringing the machine into the 21st century.
What Did I do to Speed up the MDD:
-Upgraded the ram from 192mb to Whopping 2 1gb DDR Ram (acquired from my now dead Sony Vaio PC) Cost: $0
-Opened up the power supply and clean out a handful of dust (Cools the Power supply down, extending the life) Cost: $0
-Cram in two new power-supply fans to replace the old pair (I believe this will hopefully be quieter) Cost 2*$10
-Installed the emac white fan and crafty have the fan powered by a Molex connector AND the old 120mm MB fan control. (Possibly overvolts the fan? But provides additional cooling capabilities!)
Cost: $0
replaced the obnoxious fan with a quieter fan (with blue leds! Eh, I like it) Found the unopened fan at a yard sale for $2.
Total cost of upgrade $22!
PROS:
-I can use Firefox 4 plus the extensions, Thanks tenfourfox!!!
-Download 800mb videos from streaming websites and watch smoothly on Mplayer or VLC!
-480P YouTube RUNS!
- Leopard Runs Extremely smooth on the MDD…No slowdowns at all…It actually runs YouTube 360p without any slowdowns, AWSOME
-Loving Calibre with 8000 E-books; that’s enough books to last me a lifetime! (Thanks Demonoid)
-It runs SNES emulator and Nintendo DS emulator with ease!
-Apple design execution and reliability for the parts is an A+ from me…The MDD looks Modern!
- Free! Another person trash is another person’s treasure!
Cons:
-The computer fans offer my eardrums with the spectacular “mmmmmmmmmmmm” sound, droning out all outside sounds
- I wouldn’t have to stream videos if only Netflix would make PowerPC compatible software….Why Netflix, WHYY!
-Research to find what last version of software that’s PowerPC compatible can be redundant and tiresome.
- The apple studio display option disappeared off display setting and clicking the button only offers a 2 second glow followed by nothing. (Any idea’s PowerPC Gurus??) So, after spending 3 hours searching forums (like apple.com) nobody has found a way to fix it, Thanks apple for not offering any solutions to over 40+ topics with the same issue!
-100 dollars for an ADC adapter…really apple?
-Why does PowerPC have to be a dead architecture? I’ve read they were pretty powerful and unique design.
-Hardware restrictions really do get cumbersome to remember, especially for video cards!
-Inflated Prices for this hardware is more of a gripe I have with resellers.
But hey, I am super happy there are communities like this one that still offers salvations for us PowerPC stranglers with awesome software and hardware suggestions and resources…The forum really encourages me to keep “ Being Different” and using this MDD over my own built window’s computer!
I would talk about the speed of a 500 MHz 192mb ram 10GB! Hard drive ibookg3 but that’s for another day
Thanks for the support guys and I wish you all luck to keep the PowerPC’s Truck’n.
