Mighty Jabba
Well-known member
(I posted this to the Vintage Mac subreddit, but I think it's appropriate here. And I can post more photos.)
I got this PowerMac G5 locally for $50. It didn’t have a hard disk, but the guy seemed to think that it was otherwise okay. After getting it home, the musty smell inside made it pretty obvious that it had been sitting in a basement for a long time. And while the circuit boards looked very clean, there was some weird corrosion on the steel parts of the inner frame. When I tried to plug it in with no hard disk, the fans spun up but there was no chime or video. That didn’t seem great. But I knew that a bad PRAM battery could often cause strange issues, so I ordered one of those.
While I was waiting for that to come, I decided to clean up the case and some of the interior corrosion as well as I could. It had some smudges and smear marks on the sides that didn’t want to come off with just water, but I used isopropyl alcohol and a magic eraser (separately) to get it looking very good. There were also some stickers that required some Goo-Gone and a lot of patience — some of the adhesive had gotten into holes on the front, so I had to go in with toothpicks to get it out!
I’ll spare you the details of all of my troubleshooting (various combinations of PRAM resets and pushing the reset button on the motherboard, as well as removing the RAM sticks, etc.). But I did eventually get it to display the “no disk” icon on the screen, and got it to boot from a Mac OS X Tiger DVD (but I still had no hard disk to install to, so I had to wait).
Then I replaced the PRAM battery and finally got a startup chime, but I lost video again! I was starting to worry that there were fundamental issues with this machine. It wasn’t until after I had already ordered a replacement video card (which turned out to be for the wrong model of G5 anyway) that I thought to clean the contacts of the video card with alcohol. They looked quite clean, but given the state of the other parts of the machine, this would have been a good thing to try earlier. And wouldn’t you know it, the video came right back!
This is a 2Ghz dual G5 machine with a 500GB hard disk that I added and 4GB of RAM. For some reason only 3GB are recognized by the machine, and cleaning the contacts did not help in this case. I think some of it is just bad. Still 3GB is probably plenty for what I will use it for.
I installed Tiger because I want to be able to use Classic on this machine, and it’s actually very snappy just moving around the OS, unless you’re surfing the web or something. I also picked up a used 23” Cinema Display on eBay for less than $30 since it didn’t have the power supply, but as luck would have it, I already had one from my old (now nearly dead) Cinema Display. I’ll have to say, this is still a very beautiful machine. Makes me wish Apple was making a replacement that didn’t start at $6k…
I got this PowerMac G5 locally for $50. It didn’t have a hard disk, but the guy seemed to think that it was otherwise okay. After getting it home, the musty smell inside made it pretty obvious that it had been sitting in a basement for a long time. And while the circuit boards looked very clean, there was some weird corrosion on the steel parts of the inner frame. When I tried to plug it in with no hard disk, the fans spun up but there was no chime or video. That didn’t seem great. But I knew that a bad PRAM battery could often cause strange issues, so I ordered one of those.
While I was waiting for that to come, I decided to clean up the case and some of the interior corrosion as well as I could. It had some smudges and smear marks on the sides that didn’t want to come off with just water, but I used isopropyl alcohol and a magic eraser (separately) to get it looking very good. There were also some stickers that required some Goo-Gone and a lot of patience — some of the adhesive had gotten into holes on the front, so I had to go in with toothpicks to get it out!
I’ll spare you the details of all of my troubleshooting (various combinations of PRAM resets and pushing the reset button on the motherboard, as well as removing the RAM sticks, etc.). But I did eventually get it to display the “no disk” icon on the screen, and got it to boot from a Mac OS X Tiger DVD (but I still had no hard disk to install to, so I had to wait).
Then I replaced the PRAM battery and finally got a startup chime, but I lost video again! I was starting to worry that there were fundamental issues with this machine. It wasn’t until after I had already ordered a replacement video card (which turned out to be for the wrong model of G5 anyway) that I thought to clean the contacts of the video card with alcohol. They looked quite clean, but given the state of the other parts of the machine, this would have been a good thing to try earlier. And wouldn’t you know it, the video came right back!
This is a 2Ghz dual G5 machine with a 500GB hard disk that I added and 4GB of RAM. For some reason only 3GB are recognized by the machine, and cleaning the contacts did not help in this case. I think some of it is just bad. Still 3GB is probably plenty for what I will use it for.
I installed Tiger because I want to be able to use Classic on this machine, and it’s actually very snappy just moving around the OS, unless you’re surfing the web or something. I also picked up a used 23” Cinema Display on eBay for less than $30 since it didn’t have the power supply, but as luck would have it, I already had one from my old (now nearly dead) Cinema Display. I’ll have to say, this is still a very beautiful machine. Makes me wish Apple was making a replacement that didn’t start at $6k…
