I'm not dead! I'm getting better! (CL score)

[luckybob]

I know I haven't logged in here for a while, I never really left, but slinked in the shadows. but no more!

I scored a pair of Macintosh machines tonight, naturally I have to tell EVERYONE who will listen and quite a few that don't want to. The listing somehow eluded my Craigslist email notifications, but someone on a Discord server found them and gave me the info. ( I don't think they are a member here.)

I'm not much of a MAC person, but when someone is giving them away, I can't say no. I drove 40 minutes in 1 direction to get everything, and I will admit, I might have exceeded the highway speed limit slightly. A very nice older gentleman just gave them to me for free. We had a quick discussion about what I was going to do with them. The custom power brick (on top of the silver machine) was worth the trip by itself!

I haven't looked inside yet, I plan to do that tomorrow. For very expensive reasons, my garage doesn't have heat at the moment.

The silver G5 looks like it is the last model dual G5 machine made @ 2.7ghz. and the previous owner had an aftermarket sound & usb/firewire cards installed. This thing is HEAVY. It makes perfect sense to turn a pair of these into a parch bench. (i'm kidding)

The 500mhz G4 looks mostly untouched, but again has additional usb/firewire. The 24" LCD is a prize, I sure hope that works, but I've already made out like a bandit. I have plans for the G4 and monitor, but not so much the dual G5. I love dual cpu machines, but my Macintosh experience is very limited. I already have a similar G4 but it needs a recap, but this is my first G5. I noticed it has a bit of a crooked smile (missing cd door), but i'm hoping its inside the unit and can be reattached. Anyone care to chime in on projects? Someone on Imgur suggested Linux, and that did pique my interest a bit.

PICS:

https://imgur.com/a/hOxbob2

 

[Juror22]

my garage doesn't have heat at the moment

If you run the dual G5 in the garage won't that at least raise the temperature a few degrees? ;-)

Seriously nice score for free - Those larger monitors are fantastic and it looks like it came with the adapter for it(?).
I too have a Dual G5 that I got as part of a deal and need to sort out what to try out on it, so I will watch what you do with yours.

 

[volvo242gt]

Agree with @Juror22. Very nice. And, yes, the G5 might work well as a heater. That said, if your SO doesn't mind, maybe grab a keyboard and mouse, plus a couple power cords, then set them up on the kitchen table to test them out. That way you won't be frozen.

Back in 2016 or 2017, I received a G4 QS from a guy who worked at a hardware store. He didn't want it, said that it had some issues (namely needing to have the 10.3.9 installation finished up), so he offered it to me for free. Took it home, cleaned it up, fired it up, got everything set up, then rehomed it.

 

[djhaloeight]

Can't beat free!! Nice score!

 

[luckybob]

So I cracked the machines open today.

The G5 is a little unhappy. It was upgraded with 8x 1gb sticks of ram, but finder only claimed 6gb was available. (2 empty slots in profiler) Re-seating the ram resulted in losing another 1gb. So that's a thing i'll deal with later. The firewire card was pci-x, so I assume its the 800mb version. The add-on sound card was completely forgettable.

The G4 came with a pretty cool surprise:


1.4ghz and 2gb of ram! Cool beans! Can I assume I can wipe the hard drive? Is there any drivers/utilities I should save? I'm going to assume not, but does anyone here recognize this upgrade? I didn't want to tear it apart just yet, and I didn't notice an obvious name/model number.

 

[volvo242gt]

You can probably nuke the hard drive, if desired. Heatsink looks a bit like the one on my old G4's 1.2GHz OWC Mercury processor card. I seem to remember the card itself being the usual dark green, though.

 

[luckybob]

yea, I always dban drives when I get them. I will salvage the adobe license even though i'll likely never use it. But the previous owner either cleaned his info from both machines, or did his work entirely on external drives. Which would explain the fast firewire adapters in both machines.