Mitcz.com : Official blog of Rev. Mitcz, the demented devilish comedian from Hollywood, CA.

Tonight, as I go to bed, I will be saying goodnight (figuratively, cause I don’t hug the thing) to my 5 1/2 year old G4. It’s been a great ride. Without a stretch, anything I’ve done creatively outside of my day-job has been done on this here system. So, before I let it wake me up in the morning for the last time tomorrow, I’m giving a eulogy in a historical manner by listing the various upgrades/changes I’ve done to this machine.

I bought this G4 (500 Mhz) in late January of 2000. That means it was one of the first 500Mhz G4’s out of the factory, mere weeks after Apple finally figured out how to cool these suckers down enough to actually ship 500Mhz G4s. For those that don’t remember, the first round of 500Mhz G4’s were quickly recalled because they were melting. A few months later, they bumped the speeds back up again – and I was one of the lucky people to use the “latest and greatest” from Apple.

I felt like a king.

Things that were barely ticking by in my pre-G3 machine prior (I had an 8600/250 604e machine) were now flying by at speeds I barely thought were possible. It was like a new world of computing. “Finally!” I shouted, “I can get some fucking WORK done!”. That smell of newly-assembled plastic (or whatever they use on these suckers) was emanating from my room all day when it arrived. I didn’t open the windows, for I wanted to ingest these fumes and make it a part of me.

Little did I know I’d spend the next 5 1/2 years with the G4. Tomorrow afternoon, my new 2.3Ghz PowerMac G5 arrives. It will be a great day for me, but the final moments of the old G4.

So, what all have I done to keep this aging hipster up-to-date? Ohh so much.

• January 2000 : Since my 8600/250 had an on-board A/V in/out panel, I wanted to still edit some video (and output it to my TV), but I now needed a second video card for that. I bought the ATI X-Claim VR. It had a “whopping” 16MB of VRAM.
• December 2000 : I added a second hard drive to the internals. Giving me 80GB more space. Combined w/the original internal drive, I was up to 107GB. It only took me about a year to fill both these suckers up, before I had to start archiving shit to clear up space.
• March 2001 : Bought another 256MB of RAM. I was up to 512MB now.
• August 2001 : After struggling with a weird networking issue, I relented and picked up a $20 Ethernet PCI card. It got my connection back, but oddly enough it also restored my internal Ethernet port to its fully working capacity. So, I removed it about a month later
• October 2001 : Added another 512MB of RAM for the big move to OS X. Once 10.1 arrived, most of us using OS 9 realized the majority of the initial slugs and bugs in the new OS had been ironed out and OS X might actually be useable. I was one of the idiots who bought the Apple Public Beta of OS X back when it was introduced, so I was waiting a long time to actually use this thing full-time.
• February 2002 : When I bought the G4, I chose the “DVD-RAM” option, thinking “cool, I’ll burn DVDs”. Alas, the big DVD burning push wouldn’t come for many years later, and I never felt justified in spending $20 on one disc that only my Mac could read, and would take about 6 hours to burn. Moreover, the thing didn’t burn CDs either. So, I replaced the fucker with a DVD/CD-R/W burner. This way, I could still watch DVDs, but I could also actually burn something
• September 2002 : Deciding I could no longer stand hearing about all this “Quartz Extreme” stuff in the new OS X 10.2 “Jaguar” without experiencing it first-hand, I bought myself a Radeon 8500 from ATI. 64MB of VRAM means “badass” when 16MB was all you had before that
• December 2002 : Just weeks before my AppleCare warranty ran out, the G4’s logic board fried itself. Don’t know how. Don’t know why. Just know I was glad it didn’t happen a few weeks later. An interesting aside – this was the first and only time I’ve ever brought a Mac into a technician. I brought it in sans drives. They complained “it won’t start up without a hard drive”. I said “look, those drives contain my life’s work. They don’t leave my sight. You get this thing to boot up to a blank disk screen, give me a call and I’ll pick it up”. Sure as shit – it was a hardware issue, and they called me about a week later to say “okay, it’s got a blank disk, but… we can’t guarantee that it’ll work..” I hung up the phone and rushed over before he could finish the sentence. Sure enough – it worked just fine once I plugged my drives back in.
• August 2003 : Was sick of CDs not burning correctly, bought a new Sony DVD/CD-R/W drive for about $100.
• May 2004 : The long-awaited new processor upgrade. I grabbed a 1.4Ghz processor upgrade from OWC. Thinking my G4 was going to be “ridiculously fast” now was… well, naive at best. The motherboard ain’t never gonna push beyond its original 250Mhz, thereby creating the world’s biggest bottleneck between “fast processor” and “slow-ass motherboard”. Still.. I saw a lot less of that fuckin’ beach ball.
• November 2005 : Saw a deal at BestBuy – “Buy 100-pack of DVD-R media, get a free 8x DVD burner”. I thought it was backwards, but it wasn’t. I still have about 96 unused DVDs, but this is the best damned burner I’ve ever had. Made from a company whose name isn’t even listed on the drive itself and they have no website. Thank god for 3rd party hacks in OS X – it works like a charm with everything I own, despite Apple having never built-in support for anything but their default internal drives.
• December 2004 : Tired of archiving/deleting and worrying about drive space, especially with a newfound addiction for swapping music drives w/friends, I picked up a 160GB drive to add to my internal setup. This also spelled the end of my useless Zip drive, which had to be removed to make way for the new hard drive. I’ve needed that Zip drive all of never since removing it
• January 2005 : The 80GB drive died on me. Don’t know why, but thank fuck it was right after I bought that 160GB drive and backed everything up onto it. I’d have lost everything if not for my pseudo-psychic timing. The original 27GB drive that came with this machine is still kickin’ along with (assumingly) no troubles.
• March 2005 : Bought an iPod Shuffle and decided I needed USB 2.0 like… NOW. So, I’ve got a USB 2.0 card back there, powering about 5 different devices (including both of my iPods, now that I’ve picked up a 60GB iPod Photo as well).

And now, a shot of the hero that is soon to retire.

Goonight, old friend. It’s been a good run and you’ve served me well. Now, don’t crash while I’m sleeping or I’ll never get up for work on time and then I’ll have to kick your fuckin’ ass.

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