Being a long suffering Windows user, I finally gave into the peer pressure of my upwardly mobile friends who constantly urged me to go Mac. Ever since 2001, when I was helping a friend with a short film (which he edited using Final Cut on a Sawtooth Power Mac running OS 9), I’ve thought they were beautiful machines, but I always succumbed to the thinking that Microsoft was king for a reason.
In March of 2007, I picked up a very used 600 MHz Dual USB iBook. Running Mac OS X 10.3 Panther with only 128 MB RAM, it ran circles around my 2.8 GHz Celeron Toshiba Satellite on tasks like Photoshop and iTunes. I was hooked. Within several months, it developed the well known logic board problem.
I sold the Toshiba and most of my collection of classic vinyl and purchased a 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook. It has since been upgraded to OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Within weeks, the low-end Macs came pouring in. I snagged an Indigo iMac G3 350 MHz at a SC State Surplus Sale for the princely sum of $50. It’s now loaded with 512 MB of RAM, runs OS X 10.4 Tiger like a champ, and serves as a print server, iCal station for my wife and I to organize our schedules, as well as for Quicken, and is a nifty recipe organizer/iTunes station for the kitchen.
I also ended up with the previously mentioned Sawtooth for $100. My friend had upgraded to a Power Mac G5 for editing and thought the G4 was useless. Upgraded to dual 450 MHz G4s and running Tiger, it now serves as my DVD ripping/burning station, video editing workstation, as well as functioning as a DVD player for the bedroom.
Three Macs, three distinct uses. Two of ’em saved from the landfill no less!
Thanks for doing a great job with this site! I don’t think I’d be so addicted to repurposing the old stuff without the wealth of info found here. Now, if I can just find a Power Mac G3 All-in-One, I think my collection will be complete!
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