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dontwalkhand

macrumors 603
Original poster
Jul 5, 2007
6,367
2,861
Phoenix, AZ
I do not know WHY on earth these things LOVE to pop up randomly in my life. I sold one sometime in 2011, and lo and behold, I got one from a client, absolutely free...yet another Dual 2.0Ghz G5!

Now I am going to set this thing up with OS X 10.5.8 to give to my lovely girlfriend for photo editing, but what kind of prep work should I do to it to optimize the thing? I don't want to give her something she can't use.

Here is what I was thinking:

-Older versions of iLife (iPhoto especially)
-Camino for browsing
-Mirro for YouTube?
-MS Office 2008
-Some older version of Adobe CS
-Some older version of Aperture

What else should I do to this thing to get it running good? Also, there is an ungodly huge amount of noise coming from the fan near the optical drive, what can be done about that to quiet it down? (How would i even replace it?)
 

gryffinwings

macrumors regular
Mar 25, 2012
118
0
I do not know WHY on earth these things LOVE to pop up randomly in my life. I sold one sometime in 2011, and lo and behold, I got one from a client, absolutely free...yet another Dual 2.0Ghz G5!

Now I am going to set this thing up with OS X 10.5.8 to give to my lovely girlfriend for photo editing, but what kind of prep work should I do to it to optimize the thing? I don't want to give her something she can't use.

Here is what I was thinking:

-Older versions of iLife (iPhoto especially)
-Camino for browsing
-Mirro for YouTube?
-MS Office 2008
-Some older version of Adobe CS
-Some older version of Aperture

What else should I do to this thing to get it running good? Also, there is an ungodly huge amount of noise coming from the fan near the optical drive, what can be done about that to quiet it down? (How would i even replace it?)

If she shoots raw, might need to get the adobe DNG converter if her camera is too new. Found this out when I started finding this out with my Nikon D5100, which is one of the last supported by the program for PowerPC.

Might want to give it a good cleaning.

Not sure about the drive, maybe something got caught in it.
 

craigsharp

macrumors regular
Aug 2, 2008
140
3
Oklahoma
Purchase as much memory as you can afford. As far as the software goes... iLife 09, Aperture 2, CS4, Mactubes and TenFourFox should get you where you want to be, I am currently waiting for FedEx to deliver my 2.0 DualCore PMG5 w/ 8gb ram. Can't wait i'm excited!
 

California

macrumors 68040
Aug 21, 2004
3,884
90
I do not know WHY on earth these things LOVE to pop up randomly in my life. I sold one sometime in 2011, and lo and behold, I got one from a client, absolutely free...yet another Dual 2.0Ghz G5!

Now I am going to set this thing up with OS X 10.5.8 to give to my lovely girlfriend for photo editing, but what kind of prep work should I do to it to optimize the thing? I don't want to give her something she can't use.

Here is what I was thinking:

-Older versions of iLife (iPhoto especially)
-Camino for browsing
-Mirro for YouTube?
-MS Office 2008
-Some older version of Adobe CS
-Some older version of Aperture

What else should I do to this thing to get it running good? Also, there is an ungodly huge amount of noise coming from the fan near the optical drive, what can be done about that to quiet it down? (How would i even replace it?)

Is this a dual core or dual processor? Put the activity level at highest and clean all the fans from the inside out and the cpu grate. Dust is the enemy of G5 PMs
 

zap2

macrumors 604
Mar 8, 2005
7,252
8
Washington D.C
If you don't already have one, get an SSD, you can use it in an Intel Mac down the road, and it's going to make day to day computing WAY faster.

The PowerMac has a lot of room for upgrades, and while most of them can't be used in Intel Macs, a solid state disk is a great upgrade that will be usable for quite a long time.
 

Starfighter

macrumors 6502a
Jun 17, 2011
679
35
Sweden
But they're not cheap, the prices I have seen are insane. What is a reasonable price for a 500GB SSD in the US? And is it true that the lifetime of a SSD is considerably shortened if you write and overwrite a lot of information on it?
 

Intell

macrumors P6
Jan 24, 2010
18,953
508
Inside
If you do get an SSD for it, make sure you get a SATA II one or a SATA III one that has jumpers for SATA II mode. PowerMac G5's don't work very well or at all with SATA III drives that don't have a SATA II mode.

Is this a dual core or dual processor? Put the activity level at highest and clean all the fans from the inside out and the cpu grate. Dust is the enemy of G5 PMs

It's dual processor with each physical CPU being able to computer one thread.
 

Nameci

macrumors 68000
Oct 29, 2010
1,944
13
The Philippines...
But they're not cheap, the prices I have seen are insane. What is a reasonable price for a 500GB SSD in the US? And is it true that the lifetime of a SSD is considerably shortened if you write and overwrite a lot of information on it?

500 GB for an average user is too big. 128GB for an SSD boot drive is the sweet spot.
 

VanneDC

macrumors 6502a
Jun 5, 2010
860
92
Dubai, UAE
what Namci said. 128gb for boot drive and few apps and wd black for a storage drive.. that would hoot! :D
I have a 60gb boot ssd drive in my MP and that is plenty of space for me :)
 

splitpea

macrumors 65816
Oct 21, 2009
1,133
395
Among the starlings
I had that model, sold it about 18 months ago. Max out the memory and it should be good. A larger HDD is a good idea, and an SSD boot drive would go a long way. Depending what video card it came with, you might want to upgrade that too, especially if she'll be doing graphics work.

I started out using Photoshop 7 on that machine and ended with the CS3 suite. I'd say CS3 was definitely usable, but not snappy; Illustrator and InDesign in particular were laggy. CS2 might be a better bet.

Office 2004 or 2008 should be good. Camino runs pretty well.

It won't feel like a new machine, and the fans will run like a jet engine when you're working in Photoshop, but it should have a couple more years of life as a light production machine, and several more for the email/web/word processing basics.
 
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