ricgnzlzcr said:
RacerX, where did you get all your free macs?
Usually from my clients. As they upgrade to newer systems they'll often give me what they don't need. If I find that I don't need a system or I can put together a system with a collection of parts but don't need it, I'll give it to some one who does need a system.
The best part about getting systems this way is that I know their service history... since I was the one who was servicing them.
For example, lets look at the PowerBook 3400c. Before I started working on it back at the end of 2000, it had had the display replaced after falling off a table. In 2002 I replaced the original hard drive with a 10 GB drive, and upgraded the RAM to 80 MB in 2003. I had set the system up for my client's brother to have (which included replacing the track button on the system which had been broken for about a year), but he ended up getting a PC (to play some sort of online gambling). The system stayed with him until Hurricane Katrina destroyed the area he was living in and when he moved to Minnesota it came back with him. That was when it was given to me last Fall.
After I got the system I took it apart and did a complete cleaning of it (the original owner's were smokers... yuk!) and ended up replacing the keyboard (which ran me about $19).
Since owning it I've loaned it out to a friend who wanted to learn Flash (I have Flash 5.0 installed on it) and to another client while he was on a trip (they are still using Mac OS 9 as his primary OS).
I also installed a few dozen old games on it and put together a cute box to store all the CDs for my wife. So a lot of the time she has it for playing older games like Warcraft and Myth.
Currently I'm building a server out of an old PowerTower Pro I was given (again, for free). I'm only waiting on a 68-pin to 50-pin SCSI adapter for a 36 GB drive. Once that is done I set the system up on my network (replacing my PowerMac 7500... which I also got for free). Once the hardware is set up, I'll replace the current OS (Mac OS 8.1) with Mac OS X Server 1.0.2 (Rhapsody 5.5) and transfer everything over from the 7500.
It is actually a very fast system. It benchmarks faster than a G3/233, which is pretty good for a 604e/225 (it has 1 MB of L2 cache and the bus is at 50 MHz, which helps).
Attached is a GIF of the Apple Menu on my 3400c... to give you an idea of what I've been able to do with the system.
