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.
2 comments:
Yes, you're right - I'm happy to see you using open source software. I've heard Audacity is pretty good. A lot of people seem to use it for creating podcasts. You'll have to try installing Linux on an old PC sometime to continue your support of open source software.
I have been toying with the idea of getting a Mac too - mostly for the great multimedia software. I keep putting it off though. I think I am afraid to buy any computer, fearing that it will just be old soon. I also think I might buy a powerful PC and put Ubuntu Linux on it. Or maybe I'll just stick with my employer-provided Dell Latitude D600 laptop.
I have an old PC that I was thinking of running Linux on (I downloaded Ubuntu). People here are giving away old PII and you can get a PIII for about $20. I got a PIII and made a file and printer server out of it. I didn't use Linux on it, it came with Windows so I just used that. It's great that now we are at the point where "old" technology can be had for very cheap and it's still quite useful!
Post a Comment