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What to do with an adopted G4?

iZac

iZac

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Apr 28, 2003
2,946
4,021
UK
Hi, I was walking out of my apartment this morning, when i spied a Gen 1 G4 sitting in an Ikea bag by the bin store. Looking closer, a note read "if you want this, take it, otherwise its going to be thrown out"

Now, naturally I adopted it! I rustled up an old monitor, keyboard and mouse and hit the power button. The familiar 'bong' reverberated around the room and I checked the system profile. Seems its a 1.0 model G4 with AGP graphics, and over time its had its RAM upped to 896 meg (and i think processor upped to 466mhz, since i cant find any info about 466 Gen 1 G4s)

It was wiped mostly clean (the guy / gal who owned it left a silly little playboy pic on the desktop named "surprise.jpg" haw haw)

The question is, other than it taking up space in my apartment, what should i do with this new lamb in my flock?

Now im just waiting for someone to throw out an old G4 cube!
 
NAS.

I recently got some G4 parts for this purpose (AGP graphics as well). What I am looking at is a Sonnet Tempo card (~$60)and a couple of Samsung 1.5 TB (~$99 each). There may be other SATA PCI cards, but I do not know of them at this moment in history for price point. The card I recommended is SATA 1, but I don't expect the drives to saturate the SATA bus (the PCI bus, maybe).
 
iZac said:
Hi, I was walking out of my apartment this morning, when i spied a Gen 1 G4 sitting in an Ikea bag by the bin store. Looking closer, a note read "if you want this, take it, otherwise its going to be thrown out"

Now, naturally I adopted it! I rustled up an old monitor, keyboard and mouse and hit the power button. The familiar 'bong' reverberated around the room and I checked the system profile. Seems its a 1.0 model G4 with AGP graphics, and over time its had its RAM upped to 896 meg (and i think processor upped to 466mhz, since i cant find any info about 466 Gen 1 G4s)

It was wiped mostly clean (the guy / gal who owned it left a silly little playboy pic on the desktop named "surprise.jpg" haw haw)

The question is, other than it taking up space in my apartment, what should i do with this new lamb in my flock?

Now im just waiting for someone to throw out an old G4 cube!
Click to expand...

Me... I would be tempted to grab a copy of Data Rescue II and run it through the entire drive to see what sort of life this machine once had...

Ermm.. Well, I have a G4 Cube but it's not gonna be ditched. After years of service, it's the only machine that i have which still runs OS9 natively.
 
What to do with an adopted G4?
Click to expand...

  1. Dip it in a vat of sulfuric acid, wait 5 min. then hose it off and use as a staymobile conversation piece.
  2. But a pile of thermite on top of it, spark it up, and see if the twin towers info is accurate.
  3. Tie a rope around it and use it for a boat anchor.
  4. Put a slowly rotating halogen light inside (after stripping) and a lamp fixture on top and use it for room lighting.
  5. Build little shelves inside out of mirror and use it as a jewry case.
  6. Tie it to a metal bar and use it as a weight set - increase or decrease the weight by adding or removing coke bottles filled with sand or water.
  7. Clear the street below a very high sky-scraper, throw it off, and film it falling and hitting the ground via high speed recording device.

Not in that order of course. :)
 
Tesselator said:
7. Clear the street below a very high sky-scraper, throw it off, and film it falling and hitting the ground via high speed recording device.
Click to expand...

Along the same lines, this would be a great time to test the air resistance of the G4 case in real life! Compute the theoretical time for it to hit the ground (time=[initial(downward) velocity+final velocity:D]/acceleration (9.8 m/s^2)

Final velocity can be found with velocity=initial velocity+2(acceleration)(distance traveled), if memory serves correctly.

Measured in real life, one can then find the air resistance from there :D
 
Server.

I use my 733 MHz DA G4 as an iTunes server. Attached is how I accomplished that. I said 667 MHz or better, but you could probably get by with a G3.

If you don't want to do that, either install OS 9 or get Classic going and find HyperCard (the full thing, not reader). That is probably the most useful application in the world, aside from Excel.
 

Attachments

  • Setup an iTunes Sever OS X.pdf
    32.9 KB · Views: 138
Dr.Pants said:
Along the same lines, this would be a great time to test the air resistance of the G4 case in real life! Compute the theoretical time for it to hit the ground (time=[initial(downward) velocity+final velocity:D]/acceleration (9.8 m/s^2)

Final velocity can be found with velocity=initial velocity+2(acceleration)(distance traveled), if memory serves correctly.

Measured in real life, one can then find the air resistance from there :D
Click to expand...

Hehehe... I wonder how difficult it is to measure the average force of the thermal updraft that high-rises cause? That would have to be factored in too I guess.

:D

As for an iTunes server it probably can do that but the power costs would be too high - for me anyway. $20 a month for an itunes server when iTunes on my system doesn't seem to affect the CPU much at all. 2% ~ 5% (from the available 800%). <shrug>
 
Tesselator said:
  1. Dip it in a vat of sulfuric acid, wait 5 min. then hose it off and use as a staymobile conversation piece.
  2. But a pile of thermite on top of it, spark it up, and see if the twin towers info is accurate.
  3. Tie a rope around it and use it for a boat anchor.
  4. Put a slowly rotating halogen light inside (after stripping) and a lamp fixture on top and use it for room lighting.
  5. Build little shelves inside out of mirror and use it as a jewry case.
  6. Tie it to a metal bar and use it as a weight set - increase or decrease the weight by adding or removing coke bottles filled with sand or water.
  7. Clear the street below a very high sky-scraper, throw it off, and film it falling and hitting the ground via high speed recording device.

Not in that order of course. :)
Click to expand...

thats nasty :O G4's were very sexy machines haha, ( eyes his G4 sitting on the floor ) haha

you could use it as a file server, the base can house 6 Hard drives if ya take the cd drive out and use the lower caddy for a 2.5 ;)
 
Bennieboy© said:
thats nasty :O G4's were very sexy machines haha, ( eyes his G4 sitting on the floor ) haha

you could use it as a file server, the base can house 6 Hard drives if ya take the cd drive out and use the lower caddy for a 2.5 ;)
Click to expand...

A file server? You mean cut off the top and place the daily newspaper in it - next to the exciting Playboy articles I mean - of course.

Yeah, that would be cool!
 
I had a Sawtooth G4 as a server / quake 2 box. It was OK after I overclocked the machine, but with the gigE nics I put in, it never could do decent network transfers so I gave it away.

There are some threads on these forums (including one from me) on how to optimize a G4 of that caliber, but really its not worth it. Can't make much of it with out spending money. Unless you can live with 128GB max per disk for storage. :p
 
i've got a agp 450, and theres space under the side assembly where the psu and that live, i wasnt using most of that but still had 5 hard drives in there ;)
 
Nice input guys, especially Tesselator :p

Shake 'n' Bakes iTunes server sounds like a good idea, i have got about 45 gig of music knocking about in different locations.

Then again, I was thinking perhaps i could gut it like a fish and hack a PC into it... putting OS X back onto it, of course!
 
I used my MDD G4 (1x1.25GHz) as a NAS/media server. Can serve 720p mkv files over gig-e with no trouble at all. Play flawlessly on my Core Duo (2006, 1.66GHz I think) Mac Mini "head unit".

Have Leopard Server installed on it, that way it can also be a super-easy-to-set-up caching DNS server.
 
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