Friday, June 02, 2006

My First Mac


Recently I was given a Power Mac G4 (one of the graphite boxes). It's a 400 mHz computer. It is my first real experience with a Macintosh computer. I got some RAM off of eBay and put in an old hard drive and optical drive and I was good to go. I have to admit, I really like it. It's a bit difficult to get set up (the printer setup was a bit annoying), but now I have a pretty kick-butt little media center. I can play all my mp3's, record from vinyl or cassette tape and it'll even play DVD's with surround sound. My main problem was that I wanted to put it downstairs, while the internet hookup is upstairs. The only wireless solution I could use was the Apple Airport which was really expensive (about $100.. way too much for a "free" computer. I ended up buying an ethernet bridge designed for XBox. It was $19.99 on Amazon and it works perfectly! Right now I am recording the old Thompson Twins album "Into the Gap" to mp3. Ken of "Ken's Blog" will be happy with me because I am using an open source solution to do this. The program is called Audacity and it is really powerful and useful once you figure it out.