I have been talking to several of my friends about low-end Macs and
how easy it is get a decent Mac for not a whole lot of money. I have
noticed that there are several arguments that most folks use against
going to Mac. Number one is cost, and the other ones included lack of
gaming and lack of software to run on Macs (that last one is more of a
myth, in my opinion).
Since I own three low-end Macs, I though I would share my upgrade
experience, which (against my initial expectations) turned out to be
just about at a level of a PC upgrade.
When I received my Mirror Drive Door
Power Mac G4, it was a dual 867 MDD with 1.25 GB of RAM, stock
GeForce 4 32 MB Video card, a PCI wireless G card (Buffalo) which shows
up as an AirPort Extreme, and a stock Combo Drive, stock 60 GB hard
drive.
I have a miniDV camcorder and burn video files for my folks in
Europe with their first grandson starring in most, so I needed a
SuperDrive. Most drives I have seen advertised on the Web were going
for just a tad under $100. I did some research and ended up buying a
Pioneer dual-layer burner that I installed in the bottom tray for $40.
After the install, I found latest version of PatchBurn, and my new SuperDrive is
available in iTunes and iDVD. I also use Toast with it; never seen an
issue yet.
I work as a support technician for an IT consulting firm and try to
work at least one day a week from home. Once I switched to Mac, I
noticed that having several tabs opened in the browser along with
Office software, Remote Desktop connection sessions to couple of
servers, all chatting applications for work and personal, X-lite for my
VOIP phone, my RAM was getting pretty low, so I picked up two sticks of
512 MB each on
eBay for my Mac for $16 apiece, after shipping another
$40 (making it total of $80 since I purchased the Mac). I removed
original stick of 256, and upon next boot my MDD showed 2 GB of
RAM. I have since installed Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) and have not
been able to push the memory usage over 1.2 GB yet with my normal
usage.
There were two more pieces that I was missing from the PC I switched
from. USB 2.0 was the first piece. I use an external hard drive, and
copying larger files was driving me nuts. Once again, I did my
research: There are sites specializing in selling Mac PCI USB 2.0 cards
for around $40-50. I got mine from a seller on eBay for $10 and $10
shipping (4 days from HK to Ottawa). The card was brand new, NEC
chipset, came with Windows drivers, but once installed in my Mac it
showed up fine - and the copy times are what I was used to on my PC.
That brought me to a total of $80.
As you know, Power Macs do not have a mic built in, so I was using a
USB headset with mine. It worked fine until my son ripped it apart. I
looked for a replacement and decided to install a Bluetooth dongle and
use my Bluetooth headset instead. OWC was selling those for $20, so
that brought complete upgrade project to a bit over $100.
I was going to stop there, but there was one last thing that I
missed from a PC world - occasional game of first person shooter. Video
card upgrades for Mac are not cheap, and I needed something
lower priced than Mac stores and eBay. I again went to Google and
decided on an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
128 MB. That card cost close to $240 at Mac stores online, or you
can buy a modified PC version on eBay for between $100 and $150.
I decided to do the work myself to save some money. I purchased a PC
version of the card on eBay for $50 and $20 shipping. Once it arrived,
I flashed the card (please be advised that this voids warranty on the
card and may go wrong, turning your card to an very nice Christmas tree
ornament), then I desoldered two resistors as per the wiki page on the Mac Elite
website, swapped cards, and was able to play some Halo at pretty decent
settings. Cover Flow also appears to benefit from new card. It runs
nice and smooth now.
I also ended up with a Keyspan Front Row dongle and remote (no cost
to me, but I'm told it goes for around $30), so I am able to use Front
Row on my Power Mac.
To summarize: for around $170, my Power Mac offers everything that a
new Mac would at a fraction of the cost (with the exception of a CPU
performance - I have not found this to be a bottleneck in my daily use
however).
I guess if someone is looking for adding some file to their old Mac,
it can be quite inexpensive as long as you don't mind some Google time
and for most part stay away from retail.
Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.
