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Written by Steve
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Well since we last spoke, the G5 has had it's innards cleaned and is now cruzin quite happily running Leopard.
The cleaning didn't stop at just cleaning the PCB's and fans, I had to open up the PSU which was FULL of fluff and dustballs, and the superdrive was a non-runner - intermittent read faults and consistently failed on write tasks.
Upon reassembly I replaced the superdrive with a standard dvdrw drive and installed OSX 10.5. What a dinger! Running great with 1.5 GB Ram, but that sounds a bit mean doesn't it? 1.5Gig, well now it has 5.5 Gig, and when I get round to it again I'll retire the original pair of 512's and replace with a matched pair of 1Gig sticks, then retire the the pair of 256's the same way. Best to do them in pairs, so I can see if the replacement RAM is compatible, one pair at a time. Must say I've had no problems with the RAM which was a kingston kit from Elara.ie - not specifically for a G5, but all the Specs matched, and they are CL3 (3-3-3)
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The G5 is alive!
Well my office/study is currently being gutted and decorated, but all that was put on hold just the other day when my new (to me) G5 arrived. I did, of course, conduct a preliminary examination of my delivery upon arrival and dissapointment no.1 was to see that the front "foot" was slightly bent as a result of shipping, but otherwise all was sound and secure.
Hooked up to a pc screen and pc mouse /keyboard and connected the power, after a reassuring boot chime the MAC booted from the OSX DVD in the superdrive. Dissapointment no.2; OSX 10.3 (panther) - no 64bit support then!
Anywhoo.. the OS installed fine, but the fans seemed to be working particularly hard, so I shut it all down again for a full inspection...
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History of the PC – a personal view.
My first Personal computer was a broken 8088. It weighed about the same as a bag of cement, and had about the same processing power! 16kb of memory and an 8MHz processor! wow! It had obviously been upgraded before I laid hands on it because it contained a hard drive (which wasn't standard for the original IBM PC), but of course when I got it, the hard drive wasn’t working – which made it about as useful as it was graceful. Well a quick (quick?) removal of the cover revealed that the drive cable had come off the controller card (yes – drive controller card, no such thing as IDE back then!) I plonked the cable back in the right place, replaced the lovely beige cover (steel plate I think), and switched on.
The lights dimmed briefly all over town as this monster booted, wow, Dos 2! Now I could word process or play a text-based dos game, hmmm.
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Viruses On the Up!
What with the amount of known Computer Virus varieties hitting the one million mark last month, it is little surprise that an increasing number of the computer 'repairs' that come in to Pthallo Media are actually virus infections of varying degrees of severity. In extreme cases the only certain cure is a format and clean start, which of course means that any files that aren't backed up are history! further complicated by the fact that some viruses cause the dreaded BSOD (blue screen of death), even in safe mode, it is sometimes impossible to back up data before a format, and all this is assuming that you don't have one of the rare but lethal bios corrupting viruses.
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The News
