Mac Upgrades
May 19th, 2006
My old G4 Power Mac is being used a lot. It is my mom’s primary computer she uses it for everything. I use it as a backup server, a wireless router, a printer server, and it once again holds my iTunes library. Needless to say as a computer that was released in 1999 it is a bit long in the tooth. I’ve added more RAM, some extra hard drives, and even upgraded the video card a bit. However it is still a 400 MHz CPU running on a 100 MHz system bus with its original 10 Gb hard drive running at 5400 RPM.
More RAM
I’d looked into upgrading the CPU before but it was prohibitively expensive especially when you compare it to a new Mac Mini, especially given my financial situation. However I knew how cheap RAM was and I had an empty slot so I loaded up Crucial.com and bought another 512 Mb chip. I now have 1408 Mb of RAM. I decided to get a benchmark tool and run a before and after. I used XBench which seems pretty slick. My G4 got a 15.18 both before and after I upgraded the RAM. Not exactly a glowing endorsement for adding more RAM. The average score for a Sawtooth G4 is 71.74 but many of them have CPU upgrades.
More Megahertz
The two things that are the slowest for me is ripping tracks from my CD collection and backing up external computers over the network using Retrospect. If my extra 512 megs helps out a bit with this it will be worth it. After I bought the memory I looked at G4 upgrade cards and they are now available for 300 US dollars or so. With one of those I would triple the amount of megahertz of my CPU easy maybe even four times.
Backing up your Mac
Also recently I read a no longer online blog posting about Macintosh backup software. It was an exhaustive comparison, but the conclusion was that only SuperDuper! backed up everything correctly. As someone who has paid for Retrospect and Carbon Copy Cloner this was a bit disappointing. Both Retrospect and Carbon Copy Cloner have worked OK for me. Retrospect is far from perfect but you can create a lot of custom scripts. My complaint with Carbon Copy Cloner is the automation. It just doesn’t seem to work (at all?) like I would expect. I will keep using Retrospect for regular user directory backups and maybe switch to SuperDuper! when I clone my entire hard drive to an external firewire volume.
XBench Comparisons
For comparison my PowerBook G4 (Al) with 768 MB of RAM and a 1.33 GHz CPU scored 34.65 on XBench the average for a comparable computer seems to be 86.43. I think the averages might be a tad inflated either being compared to a different baseline system or because the people who run and submit their data to XBench are people with top of the line and/or tweaked systems.
Epilogue
This old G4 was in storage for years while I’d been in China. I did remember the password and it did boot up after I finally got it out of storage. It can no longer connect to the iTunes store so it doesn’t even work as a digital jukebox. I finally got an AppleTV for that purpose and long ago got a Time Capsule to handle my backups. That eventually died so now I am back to a big external hard drive I plug directly into my MacBook Pro.
I can’t believe this post still attracts spam, but if you have a legit comment you want to leave about the old G4 powered computers of which I owned at least two, you still have a brief opportunity to do so, but I may regret letting a probably spam comment through, but these old Mac upgrade posts have some value though I’m going to have to manually check all the links now because of domain squatters. Maintaining a webpage for twenty plus years and keeping the links and taxonomy up to date is a lot of work.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Apple, Mac, Time Machine.
It’s wild seeing someone still putting a G4 Sawtooth to work! I remember those machines being absolute tanks back in the day. It’s really interesting that your XBench score didn’t budge after adding that 512MB chip. In my experience with those older architectures, you often hit a hard wall with the 100 MHz system bus speed long before the RAM capacity becomes the hero, which explains why the benchmark stayed flat.
I’ve kept an old G4 around myself for similar “utility” reasons. While the CPU definitely struggles with modern web browsing, those machines are still incredibly useful for hardware interfacing. I actually used a similar tower recently by popping in a PCI-E expansion card https://serverorbit.com/network-devices/serial-adapters/pci-e to add a few serial ports. It’s perfect for managing legacy network switches and older lab equipment that just won’t play nice with modern USB-to-serial dongles. They make surprisingly stable little servers if you don’t mind the power draw.
Since you’re using it as a wireless router and backup server, have you found the legacy 10/100 network speeds to be a major bottleneck, or does the sheer reliability of the old hardware make the slower transfers worth the wait?
This is most likely spam, the fact that I got two similar posts, but it is still a surprise that someone would spam an almost twenty year old blog post about upgrading a then 5+ year old PowerMac. The machine still runs or it did at my last apartment, but Apple will no longer let it connect to the iTunes aka Apple Music this means all the songs I’ve bought in the last years I can’t listen to on this old machine. It still has lots of hard drives especially if you connect all the old external drives. I suppose I should edit this post one last time as people do search for old obscure error messages and one my blog posts ranks for that. I actually think about downgrading this machine to run OS 9 and maybe having to go back to the stock 400 MHz processor for retro gaming but I just don’t have the time. Best of luck spamming and trying to sell adapters.
This is another post that attracted over 80 spam comments. I’ve spent a lot of time, money, and effort upgrading my G4 Tower AKA Loretta. I also recently bought a Time Capsule so that now handles all my networking, print serving, backing up duties and all my ultra upgraded G4 tower does is play music. It isn’t even turned on right now as I keep looking at old blog posts and try fixing them or at least figure out why they are popular, at least with spammers since I don’t get that many real readers…