[geeks] Princeton Univ. Surplus haul today...

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 10:45:38AM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> What is a good *cost effective* graphics card upgrade - this is an AGP
> system (2x!), and I am ignorant about video cards in general, esp. on
> Macs - is there a low-cost card that will have a profound impact on
> the performance od Tiger (OS/X 10.4)? 

Most bang for the least money and/or pain would be to find a FX5200 for
the Mac.  Perhaps one being labled as a Cube upgrade (Cubes also have
AGP 2X, and not many people bother labeling what PMG4s the cards will
work in). 

The other easy cheap choice would be a Radeon 9000/9200, but I believe
those aren't Core Image compatible, while the FX5200s are.

For more performance, there are reports of being able to hack 9600s,
9700s, and 9800s into those machines, with mods ranging from firmware
trickery (the 9700 was never an official Mac choice) to physical
modifications.  Sounds like too much trouble to me though.

I think there may be one ATI boxed for mac variant of the 9600 (as
opposed to the Apple OEM 9600s)  that will work on Sawtooths, but it is
certainly to be far more expensive than anything I've mentioned so far.
 
> The machine currently has an IDE DVD-ROM drive, any reason I can't
> just pop in a new DVD-R/W drive and burn DVDs under OS/X 10.4? 

Someone else probably mentioned it, but there is a utility that I can't
remeber the name of that you will need to run to convince the consumer
Apple software to use a non-Apple drive.  Third party software and DVD
Studio apparently don't require the patch.

I never got around to trying the patch as I was happy using my burner on linux.
 
> Also, there is a bunch of software on the old 20 Gig HD (MS Office,
> etc.) any ideas on how to transfer it to the new 100 Gig HD? I asume I
> COULD run it off the 20 Gig HD if I made it a spare drive, correct? 

I think you just drag the application folder to the new disk.

> All in all, it is a pretty capable machine - looks to have been
> decomissioned last December (that's when the last update was
> installed), and for $43 for a fairly clean (minor scratches on the
> plastic, but all plastic intact) I'm quite happy.  

January 2005 I paid $200 for a lesser machine (128megs of ram, and only
OS 9.2).

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd at jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/