Category Archives: lowendmac

Making use of old Apple computers

OS X parental controls on a netbook

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, … Continue reading

Posted in computers, lowendmac, MacOS X | 5 Comments

Big fat hard drive in a 700 MHz G4 iMac

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, computers, hardware, lowendmac, MacOS X, operating systems, thrift | 4 Comments

Repairing a G4 ‘Anglepoise’ iMac

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, lowendmac, thrift | 4 Comments

Innocence lost

With 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 … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, children, computers, family life, lowendmac, MacOS X, thrift | 2 Comments

G4 Tower of Power!

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, computers, hardware, lowendmac, MacOS X | 2 Comments