Tag: Mac Page 2 of 34

I finally got around to taking my G4 Sawtooth PowerPC Mac tower offline, and it was not something I did without mixed emotions.

My Mac buddy had served me well since around 2000.

It was a Frankenstein Mac in that it had a bunch of after-market hardware upgrades that allowed it to run circles around its back-in-the-day stock G4 Power Macs.

Time had caught up with this slice of Apple goodness.

The lack of a modern browser for it made Internet use intolerable.

At one time, I had my choice of Roccat, TenFourFox, and Leopard Webkit to explore the web on the G4.

These browsers are not currently maintained. So it’s pretty much like rolling the dice regarding whether you get anywhere when using them now.

Take it from me, though. None of the browsers works well. Slowness, crashing, and freezing are just a few of the disappointing things you will experience if you try them.

All of it makes me sad.

It can run Office 98 just fine.

The flatbed scanner attached to it via a SCSI card works just as well as when I bought it.

Guess it just goes to show you the modern web is unforgiving when it comes to minimum hardware requirements to get anything done.

Modern websites require modern browsers with all current security updates to safely and swiftly navigate the web.

I knew this day would come, but I was in denial.

Why wouldn’t I be?

Having a computer as my daily driver for the better part of 20 years is unheard of for most people.

Over the years, I picked up a couple of Core 2 Duo PCs to compensate for the age creeping the G4 was experiencing on the web.

I started to use the G4 less and less as most of my work became Internet-only driven.

It threw two kernel panics when I started it up recently.

That had never happened before.

Time waits for no man nor old Mac.

I began copying over things like documents and photos accumulated through the years.

It took over an hour to copy my old iPhoto library via the creeky USB 2.0 ports on the G4.

It only had USB 2.0 because I installed a USB PCI card many years ago.

The original configuration on the G4 tower had two built-in USB 1.1 ports that were left unused in favor of the USB 2.0 card ports.

I considered the time it took to copy all of that via USB 2.0 a blessing.

All things being relative, I thought it was time to eventually move to something that had USB 3.1.

The two Core 2 Duo PCs (HP Compaq and an off-brand Tangent tower) had USB 2.0.

This Chromebook I’m typing on has 1 USB port that doesn’t get much use. I don’t typically use it to transfer data and have no clue what level of USB it supports.

I only know the G4 was good enough for so many years.

Its fans ran loudly.

I hadn’t opened up the case to clean it out in over a few years.

That made me feel guilty, but it wouldn’t have changed the fact it was time to consider a replacement Mac of some kind.