From Mac Tinkerer to Full Time Mac User

- 2008.05.12

My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your submission to Dan Knight .

I'm 40 this year and have been interested in computers since 1981, when a teacher wheeled a TRS-80 into our class to tally and rank our grade averages for each student. I then had a friend a year or two later get an Atari 800, prompting me to do the same so we could play games and type up simple BASIC programs.

In college (late 80s), some friends of mine were in computer programming and had, at first, Apple IIe computers. Later, around 1988, they acquired a Mac SE/30 each. These were the first people I had seen with networked computers that were able to go online. I believe they accessed an engineering BBS. Other friends over the years bought different Macs, but some others went the PC route.

My friends in the PC world (along with the cheaper retail prices) convinced me to get a PC. In 1999, I got a fairly high-end Compaq Presario midsized tower running Windows 98. It worked fine and got me on the Internet. I kept this computer for two-and-a-half years when the power supply fried. Being a tinkerer, I decided to build my own 1 GHz desktop with as many salvaged parts as I could from the Presario - and upgraded to Windows XP. That computer lasted me to late 2004.

But during that three-year period, I acquired and resold numerous Macs off of eBay to tinker and play around with, including an SE/30 and a Color Classic (upon which I successfully performed the modifications to create a "Mystic" CC), and a Power Mac 7300. All ran some variant of the classic Mac OS, from 7.1 up to 9.2 . When I was done tinkering or upgrading, I'd resell it on eBay and look for the next older Mac to play with.

Mac OS X

Wanting to get in on the OS X fun, I bought a 400 MHz Blue and White G3 on eBay for $100, found an OS X 10.2 disc, and started tinkering. This setup was great, and I always had my "main" homemade PC for the "real" work - until the PC died. This time it was the power supply and the BIOS. So I made the G3 (nicknamed "BigBlue") my main computer so I could surf the Web and see about getting another PC.

Except I didn't get another PC. I found I could do everything with this 400 MHz G3 and OS X 10.2 that I could with my 1 GHz PC and Windows XP - and much more simply. This got me to decide to go Macintosh full-time, which I did in late 2004.

I moved back home to New Orleans in March 2005 (six months before Hurricane Katrina) after a two-year stay in Lafayette, LA, with the G3 in tow, still performing well, only now I had bumped it to Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" and upped the RAM and hard drive. I was terribly pleased with this computer, and it served me faithfully without error, running the latest operating system at the time, despite being an "old" computer.

My only problem was I noticed it was a bit sluggish on encoding MP3s, a burgeoning hobby of mine that came with a new MP3 player I received. I decided to go "whole-hog" and found a 1 GHz Power Mac G4 "Mirror-Drive-Door", once again on eBay, for $800. I loaded Panther on there and never looked back. It did everything, including processor-intensive tasks, beautifully. I absolutely loved this computer. I was planning on using and tinkering with this computer for the long-haul.

In August 2005, I received flood waters from Katrina. While I personally fared okay as far as storm damage went and was very thankful, my beautiful G4 (stationed on the floor next to the computer desk) got enough water in it to ruin it. While exiled out of the city from the hurricane, I was forced to buy a PC laptop. Emergency finances dictated I only spend $700, which ruled out the iBook G4 I was eyeing. The PC laptop next to it would have to do.

Going Intel

I kept the PC laptop until Apple announced the new MacBook line, and after they were shipped with the 2 GHz Core 2 Duo chip, I went out and bought one in February 2006. I am typing this email on that MacBook, and I couldn't be happier. I am running Tiger with 2 GB of RAM and even have Windows XP running under VMWare Fusion for a program or two.

I still have fond memories of the G3 and G4 Power Macs, but I can't be sad, since my current MacBook could run circles around them both. But it is amazing to me that computers of that age could run the very operation system that my current MacBook does with no problem, although perhaps a bit slower. My old Presario could barely handle XP when I tried it, and then there were driver issues with Compaq's proprietary components. I've never had those problems with any Mac.

In fact, the biggest compliment I can think of for the Mac (any of the ones I've owned) is this: With PCs, I always seemed frustrated by what I couldn't do after a period of time owning them. With Macs, I always seem amazed at what they are capable of, even when doing a tasks that they "shouldn't" be able to do, like run the latest operating system.

Name a 400 MHz PC that could run Windows Vista, were you able to load it at all. But we have folks out there successfully running Leopard on computers as slow as a 450 MHz Power Mac.

That, simply put, is amazing.

Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.

Recent My Turn articles

Using Low End Macs for Internet Radio, 08.18. When the local public radio station moved classical music to HD radio, it was time to find another way to listen. An old iMac with iTunes solved the problem.
'That's Not a Computer', 07.30. Salvaging a broken PowerBook by turning it into a desktop computer.
Upgrading a Digital Audio G4 to work better in Leopard, 06.02. In its original configuration, the dual 533 MHz Power Mac G4 was slow with Mac OS X 10.5, but add the right upgrades, and it runs Leopard quite nicely.
My 4 favorite PowerBooks, 05.28. The PowerBook 150 has a big screen for a vintage PowerBook, the 165c has color, the 100 is diminutive, and Lombard has USB and a great keyboard.
More in the My Turn index.

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Mac of the Day: 15" MacBook Pro Core Duo, Jan. 2006 - The first Intel-based MacBook launched at 1.83-2.0 GHz, had several teething problems.
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