Archive for the 'lowendmac' Category

OS X parental controls on a netbook

Published
by
blogmywiki
on June 1, 2010
in MacOS X, computers and lowendmac
. 5 Comments

My kids want to use my Hackintosh netbook - a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 running Snow Leopard. One of the great things about OS X is its excellent built-in parental controls, but on a netbook with a small 600 pixel-high screen, the buttons for setting them up are off the screen.

I tried using an external monitor - with amusingly mad and useless results… then I found this trick. Open up a Terminal window and type
defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.8

This makes the next window you open small enough to see the required buttons. Set up the parental controls, type
defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1
in the Terminal command line.

Sweet!

Big fat hard drive in a 700 MHz G4 iMac

Published
by
blogmywiki
on February 18, 2008
in Apple, MacOS X, computers, hardware, lowendmac, operating systems and thrift
. 3 Comments

Conventional wisdom says that any G4 iMac slower than 1 GHz cannot work with a hard drive bigger than 120 GB. But they were selling 320GB IDE drives in Maplin for only £59.99 and it seemed silly to pay ten or twenty quid less for a fraction of the storage - anyhoo if it didn’t work I could always bung the big drive in my USB/Firewire caddy and use it for backing up the backups of my photos…

So I opened up the iMac again, inserted the drive, had considerably more trouble getting it back together this time but got there. Expecting nothing (I thought I’d broken the IDE cable aside from the fact that most web sites said this would not work) I powered up. Bing! Flashing folder, as expected.

Inserted Panther install disc - installer ran but couldn’t find a hard drive. Well fair enough, it’s factory fresh and not formatted, so I used Disk Utility on the Panther install disc to format it as Mac OS X Journalled.

But the installer still wouldn’t install - it found the drive but it had a red warning triangle next to it and the words “You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot start your computer from this volume”.

Game over, I thought. Either the IDE cable is broken or - as people say - the drive is just too big for an old Mac. But before I gave up I had a word with Mr Google (thank you Jamie Oliver) and found this page which told me to give it a reboot. And by jove, he’s right. It’s insane, but he’s right. After a swift kick the installer happily ran and here I am typing this on an ancient 700 MHz G4 iMac that cannot possibly work with a hard drive larger than 120 GB, and yet I have 300 GB free… ah so many things to try… more memory, video editing, installing a DVD burner, keeping all my MP3s, getting all my photos off my PowerBook which has run out of disk space…

look ma! 300GB free!

Repairing a G4 ‘Anglepoise’ iMac

Published
by
blogmywiki
on February 17, 2008
in Apple, lowendmac and thrift
. 2 Comments

My son’s school was chucking out a faulty 700 MHz G4 Anglepoise iMac - apprently it had an intermittant fault where the hard drive clicked and it wouldn’t boot. Of course I couldn’t bear to see this become land-fill so I brought it home to my Macintosh Sanctuary.

At first it seemed fine but whilst installing OS X, the thing died. Click, click, click. All I could do was get it to boot into Open Firmware - it wouldn’t even eject the CD-ROM. I was convinced I’d killed it, but a couple of bright sparks at work suggested that the hard drive might have just finally kicked the bucket. As it shares its IDE interface with the CD-ROM drive this might also explain why the CD wouldn’t eject. Armed with some instructions from XLER8YOURMAC, size 10 and 15 Torx (star-shaped) screwdrivers and an old 4GB Bondi Blue iMac hard drive, I explored.

I actually found the whole thing easier than that article suggested. First using a small cross-pointed screwdriver you undo the base plate to get at the user-servicable parts - a memory slot and Airport card slot:

user servicable parts

Then the big Torx T15 screwdriver comes into play - undo the 4 Torx screws and pull the whole base - including the white plastic bit where the ports are. Be gentle but firm as you are unplugging connectors as you do this.

prising open

At this point you can swap its internal memory card if you like, but I was interested in the grey drive assembly. I disconnected its IDE connector on the motherboard and unclipped the 2 cables clamped to its right. Then I used the T10 Torx screwdriver to remove the 6 screws holding the drive assembly in place (click on photo to see notes):

drive assembly

I then pulled the drive assembly down and towards me.

fan and gubbins

I then removed the IDE and power connectors from the hard drive, peeled the strange white plastic wrapper off and removed the IDE drive from its caddy using a Torx screwdriver.

the dead hard drive

I replaced it with a 4 GB hard drive from my original 233 MHz Bondi Blue iMac - one tenth the size of the one I removed but this was a temporary measure to prove that this was the problem before I shell out some real money on an 80GB drive. I put it all back together, forgetting the thermal paste for now, and turned it on:

Never so pleased to see OS 9!

I’ve never been so pleased to see the OS 9 splash screen! That old iMac hard drive must have been confused though - it fell asleep in a 233 MHz CRT G3 Bondi Blue iMac and woke up in a 700 MHz LCD G4 anglepoise iMac… I never liked the G4 iMac when it came out, but now I have one I think it’s a great machine. And easier to get inside than the Bondi Blue beastie…

Innocence lost

Published
by
blogmywiki
on February 26, 2007
in Apple, MacOS X, children, computers, family life, lowendmac and thrift
. 2 Comments

old g3 tower gets exciting new featuresWith a slightly heavy heart I’ve had to install parental controls on the computer in the back room - which meant upgrading the G3 Tower of Power from MacOS 10.3 to 10.4 (Tiger).

The boys had been looking at some very mildly risque videos on a web site they’d got off some friends - eldest is only 7. The computer is in a shared room, but not a room where they’re very noticable, which is probably a bad thing but there’s nowhere else to put it, and I don’t like their sticky fingers on my PowerBook very much. Makes me nervous.

So, another little bit of innocence lost.

But the nerd in me was quite pleased to have figured this out: I had MacOS 10.3 installed on a 20GB drive that had been partitioned in two. I only have an upgrade installer for 10.4 that requires 10.3 to be installed before it’ll run. But once it’s found a 10.3 installation, you can use Disc Utility on the 10.4 updated DVD to repartition / reformat the disc that 10.3 is itself on. So all the files you need for OS 10.4 must be on the updater DVD. And I only had to spend an hour or two shovelling a spare DVD drive into it and updating the OS, and recreating everyone’s accounts and finding  wallpaper of James Bond and Thierry Henry and worrying about data I might have inadvertantly wiped…

G4 Tower of Power!

Published
by
blogmywiki
on December 4, 2006
in Apple, MacOS X, computers, hardware and lowendmac
. 2 Comments

Someone was chucking this out - a G4 PowerMac with OS 8.6, a 10GB hard drive and 64MB RAM.

I spent £30 on 256MB more RAM, and stuck in it the 20GB hard drive I used to have in my BondiBlue iMac. Luckily this hard drive already had OS X on it, as this G4 doesn’t have a DVD-ROM drive. Made this drive the master, added the computer’s own drive back in as a slave, and now I have a pretty servicable computer in the back room for the kids and family - all for £30. The flooping huge Apple Studio Display gives a damn good picture too!

Still a few things to do - this is one of the very first G4 PowerMacs I think, and it only has a miserly 2 USB ports, so a USB hub is pretty essential. But it also has two Firewire ports and once I’ve flattened the 10GB drive I’m going to see if it’s up to some video editing. A DVD-ROM or CD-R drive would be cool too, if possible.