Power Mac G4 Upgrade Part One.

Hey Guys! This is my first post on thecreativeone.tv and I really hope that you enjoy reading my blog posts!

Recently I bought a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, with 733Mhz G4 processor, 256mb RAM, No hard drive and the the crumby 32mb standard graphics card. From the moment i got the machine I was impressed with the design of the machine and even by today's standards compared to some PC's you see around today, the Power Mac is still a beautiful machine.

I really wanted to upgrade the machine to bring it back to date, to hopefully run some programs that i run on my Mac Pro and run as a media center and such.

To upgrade my Power Mac i bought a 120gb western digital hard drive, 1gb RAM from Crucial Ram and PCI usb hub. 

The parts went in the machine nicely and after a few hours work i was running 10.4.11 on the Power Mac and it was running pretty quick for today. But i had a few more problems, the machine was very loud, and the graphics card couldn't keep up when running YouTube videos etc, which is expected. Two things that would really bug me.

I went down to PC World (The name is really ironic to say i was going to be putting the parts in a Mac) and i bought three new silent fans, one that would replace the fan cooling the CPU, another to replace the big 120mm fan that was cooling the majority of the computer, and the last one that was blowing air out of the power supply unit.

I have on phrase to say, Mac's do not like to be ripped to pieces. It was a nightmare trying to get all of the fans out of the mac, and then replacing them with all new ones, but after a few hours and several scuffed knuckles, I had replaced every fan inside the Power Mac. 

All the pain was definitely worth it though as when the Power mac was all back together it was considerably quieter than it previously was. Next up was the graphics card.

Now for financial reasons, the cheapest way for me to upgrade the Power Mac's graphics card, was to buy a PC Graphics card and flash it for use with a Mac, easier said than done. The graphics card came, we popped it into an old PC i had laying around and booted up Windows XP.

We created an MS DOS CD, which is considerably hard to make than creating an MS DOS floppy disc and booted into MS DOS, to find out, to flash the graphics card we needed to use a floppy disc, which naturally, because floppy discs are nearly as old as me, I don't have a floppy disc drive or any floppy discs, so it was time to scavenge around.

Now luckily because a friend of mine, has old computers for testing and upgrading, he could find me an old floppy disc drive we could pop into the PC we was using to flash the graphics card, again because he'd never had a need for floppy discs, he didn't have any.

So more work had to be done, I had to go onto trusty eBay and buy some floppy discs, something I thought i'd never do, this morning, a packet of floppy discs landed on my door mat. Stay tuned for an update, and I hope you will enjoy my blog posts in time to come!

Sam

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