June 2nd marked one year since a work colleague gave (yes, gave) me a Power Mac G5 computer – my first working Macintosh system and, of more interesting note, a specimen of the last generation of PowerPC based Macintosh computers. With me being the kind of tech enthusiast I am the machine was naturally a welcome addition to my collection of obsolete but still wonderful electronic devices!
So, it’s been a year. Quite a quick year, honestly, and in that time I’ve purchased quite a few additional Macintosh systems of varying ages, building a respectable collection that I’m well behind on writing about, but that’s not the focus here.
The focus is that G5 system and honestly I thought I would have done more with it over the past year.
It’s a pretty stock system – a late 2005 2.0 Ghz Dual Core system, with PCIe for expansion options — however, available options that will work with Mac OS 10.5.8 certainly have to be limited. 8 GB of Memory gives me quite a bit of room for various creative projects, but of course the software I can use is somewhat outdated.
Of course, that’s the fun thing about all of this — I enjoy using these old machines for the experience and, in a way, the challenge of making them useful nearly a decade after their prime.
Of course something that stays constant on older computers is gaming and while the graphics card in the G5 (I think an Nvidia 6600 LE) is weak – very weak – it’s still good enough for some games. Hell, Halo is at least playable, but older games are nice to run too. Thing is, I don’t game much at all right now so, that’s also out.
It’s a shame, really — I just haven’t had time to enjoy the machine in depth beyond one particular day a few months ago where I really just sat down and used the machine for a day, for the hell of it. Given the fact that machines of this age crawl trying to browse the modern internet, that was a “so-so” experience at best.
I did install a slightly older version of Mac OS X, Tiger, and OS 9 for “classic” support, but by the time things were all said and done I really didn’t like the idea of dual booting the machine between Tiger and Leopard, and deleted that partition in favor of keeping the machine a dedicated Mac OS 10.5.8 machine. The need for Tiger and Classic on the machine became a moot point a few days later when another, slightly older G4 system arrived, which is something I’ve yet to write about.
So, that’s really where we stand – a machine that I just adore, but kind of don’t use. Not because I don’t want to use it, far from it; I just simply can’t find the time to just sit down and figure out what I want to do with it.
It has a proper Apple keyboard and “Mighty” mouse, a good set of speakers, and a nice enough monitor. It runs fine, has a healthy hard drive in it, and I’ve got no shortage of programs I can try on it. I’ll certainly one day just sit down and get things exactly as I want them, and that’s where the fun of these old computers, and this hobby really is — making them what you want them to be. After all, your current computer, when you first bought it, wasn’t how you wanted it until probably many weeks into regular usage. Imagine how long that could take with a computer you only fire up once every few weeks.
Right, enough of that rambling, more to come on the rest of my crazy Macintosh collection. I just thought that might be a fun one to cover.
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