Swapping out an optical drive for a hard disk drive to gain extra storage is a sensible way to upgrade your ‘Book if you’re not at all using optical media anymore. Especially if the benefits of storing a ton of stuff on local storage far outweighs the benefits of keeping a SuperDrive or Combo Drive […]
Category Archives: Low End Mac Hacks
Who could’ve predicted that certain technical iterations would stick around for much longer than expected? Back in the 80s and 90s, external and internal ports would seemingly iterate more frequently as years go by, with the computer industry being less developed then. It’s been two decades since the first Mac shipped with a SATA drive, […]
Certain iMacs from the early 2010s and late 2000s have an MXM GPU slot inside them, allowing for the graphics card to be replaced or upgraded. All 27″ and 21.5″ 2009 – 2011 iMacs have an MXM 3.0 slot, with the exception of the late 2009 21.5″ iMac with the base GeForce 9400m GPU. MXM […]
The Early 2008 15″/17″ MacBook Pro sits in a unique position among the pre-unibody MacBook Pros having SSE 4 in its Core 2 Duo CPUs, standing heads and shoulders above the 2006/2007 models. As a result, it was able to piggyback off the same “wave” the Mac Pro 3,1 – 5,1 did with patchers such […]
This may be old news to some, but I totally forgot about it until I found out about it (again)! If you have a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad in Leopard on a PowerPC Mac, you can enable momentum scrolling just like an Intel Mac in two easy steps. . To enable natural scrolling on […]
So you wanna have multitouch on your old ‘Book without necessarily buying a Magic Trackpad? The way it was theorized to be possible: Taking the multitouch trackpad out of an A1260 MacBook Pro and plugging it into an older A1181 2007 MacBook. Many have said this wasn’t possible or doable, claiming there was possibly a […]
Ah, the elusive method of booting on a PowerPC Mac: USB. For far too long it’s been said it’s not doable, or the results have been hit-or-miss, or the answer hasn’t been straightforward at all. Well today, there’s a surefire way to boot USB on PowerPC Macs – all thanks to DistroHopper39B from MacRumors. While […]
The very first Mac minis came with ether a Core Solo T1200, or one of two Core Duo 32-Bit CPUs. These CPUs hold back the 2006 Mac mini from being able to take advantage of a newer OS, increased RAM capacity, and overall better performance. Now in 2025 these first-gen Intel minis are cheap to […]
The Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, aka PCIe, is a longstanding serial computer expansion bus standard created in 2003. The Late 2005 Power Mac G5 was the only PowerPC Mac which took advantage of this technology, which had a production run of October 2005 – August 2006. As a result, AGP/PCI-based Macs received 1-2 years lesser […]
The 2003 Power Mac G5 was the first in a line of controversial 64-Bit PowerPC Macs, which suffered from above average hardware failure/glitchiness rates. While not the most popular Mac in the lineup of PowerPC Macs overall, the Power Mac G5 still packs a punch, and can be used for a wide variety of things. […]
Mac Pro Evolution Each design of the Mac Pro over the years has had its advantages and disadvantages when it comes to overall system architecture and design, including the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) options available. Many factors are at play when determining what kind of graphics card you can run with your Mac Pro, as […]
I have found that, by far, the easiest way to install Leopard on unsupported G4s is to spoof the clock speed in Open Firmware before installing. Spoofing will have Open Firmware tell OS X that your G4 is up-to-speed until you reboot. This will allow you to install without hacking an install disc or working in […]