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I found a G4 MDD 1.42Ghz in a Dumpster. Now what?

weckart said:
Depends. The website MacOS9lives suggests not. That site skews heavily towards DAWs. There are tons of sofware and hardware peripherals that only run under OS9 and are still making music today.
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Indeed. One of my siblings is a professional musician who has made a slew of chart hits that were produced with the involvement of Macs that are running sound engineering software and are interfaced to sound engineering hardware that requires OS9.

Catalina is useless for me because I'm quite happy with El Capitan and the older versions of OS X serve me well, regardless of their obsolescence. :)
 
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weckart said:
Depends. The website MacOS9lives suggests not. That site skews heavily towards DAWs. There are tons of sofware and hardware peripherals that only run under OS9 and are still making music today.
Click to expand...

Around three years ago , I built up a PMG4 running eMagic for a studio , complete with a period interface . They used it for an intern and also some minor projects . This was long after it was past its prime .
 
Making Progress. Now I am just waiting for a few components to officially start the setup process. Some eBay sellers are taking their sweet time.
RRIrgrn.jpeg
 
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adamjackson said:
Looks like it's the Radeon 9000 Pro GPU. 9800s aren't that much more expensive but I think I may end up using it for Ubuntu so I can run a more modern browser. Lots more research to do and I'll post an update once I have it up and running.

definltey going to do the thermal paste. thanks for the tip!!
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I have a Dual 1.25 with a 7800GS, if it hadn't died I would've tried running some kinda Linux distro to see how well it would do with a more modern OS, especially overclocked. It died from overclocking it seems. Got 1.5 GHz stable as long as the CPU stayed under 55c, after that it would immediately panic. If I ever revive it I will watercool it and see if I can take it to 1.75. These 7455s really start to shine above 1.67 GHz, beating the crap out of even a 2 GHz 7448.
 
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PROGRESS! Just killing time and waiting for the SSD & additional RAM to arrive but the Airport and Bluetooth cards work great. I'll have 3 drives after the SSD arrives where I"ll have OS 9 on one, leopard on another and Ubunutu on the SSD as that'll be the primary drive.

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jmilan0302 said:
I have a Dual 1.25 with a 7800GS, if it hadn't died I would've tried running some kinda Linux distro to see how well it would do with a more modern OS, especially overclocked. It died from overclocking it seems. Got 1.5 GHz stable as long as the CPU stayed under 55c, after that it would immediately panic. If I ever revive it I will watercool it and see if I can take it to 1.75. These 7455s really start to shine above 1.67 GHz, beating the crap out of even a 2 GHz 7448.
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The machine is living in the basement (aka my workspace) and it stays 50 degrees there year-round which actually should make the computer significantly happier overall.
 
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adamjackson said:
PROGRESS! Just killing time and waiting for the SSD & additional RAM to arrive but the Airport and Bluetooth cards work great. I'll have 3 drives after the SSD arrives where I"ll have OS 9 on one, leopard on another and Ubunutu on the SSD as that'll be the primary drive.

ekL1GIy.jpeg

[automerge]1581547879[/automerge]


The machine is living in the basement (aka my workspace) and it stays 50 degrees there year-round which actually should make the computer significantly happier overall.
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Do you still need a usb2 card? I have an extra if you it. PM me.
 
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BTW, Now that I have Mac OS Leopard running on the OWC SSD, HUGE upgrade. Yes still limited by the IDE interface but not having to wait for a disk arm to move around a platter makes a huge improvement to how fast this machine is. Apps open instantly. The SSD does really bring new life to an old machine:
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/power-mac-g4/2002-2004

Now the most limiting part of this machine is actually the processors. leopard + TenFourFox and web pages have the CPU pegged at 100% crazy actually because it's been a long time since the CPU has been my personal limiter on any machine.
 
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z970mp said:
Out of curiosity, how does it drive with foxPEP installed? At least on newer machines, I believe CPU usage has been reported to decrease with it in than otherwise.

(https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/foxpep-the-firefox-partitioned-engine-patch.2209108/)
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Just wanted to follow up. I do think your prefs while helped quite a bit. I used the machine all night for normal web browsing...well I was working on the motorcycle and needed to pull up some online guides, torque specs, bolt sizes etc and things did feel snappier.
 
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Not to necro this thread too much, but I was going to make a new one about upgrading my own new MDD, a 1.25 FW400 model, and this has every bit of advice I could use in it. From the best OS 9 capable video card, where to get a ram upgrade, to advice on a sata pci card, I have a good roadmap on upgrading my last of its kind system.
 
@repairedCheese Given how these things have poor airflow in the PCI bay, and how the often hot, failure-prone PSU happens to sit right next to it, I would suggest mounting a spare fan wedged within the extended PCI card brackets (on the door, next to the front speaker), and then connecting it to the 12V line from one of the spare HD molex connectors.

For me, this has made a small difference in temperatures in both the GPU and the PSU, enough so that I think makes it worth going to the trouble installing to lessen the chances of thermal-related failures.
 
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