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What have you done with a PowerPC today?
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I think its PCxxxx = DDR, PC2xxxx = DDR2, PC3xxxx = DDR3 etc.
But, the overlapping between generations is probably the cause for people having so much memory compatibility problems? They, like me, thought that for example 400 DDRx -memory is always DDR compatible where in fact the DDR2 can also be 400 and not compatible with the previous generation. 🤯
And highly variable naming conventions with online sellers makes it even more error prone and confusing. If sellers do not know what they are selling then it is really difficult for the buyer to buy correct memory.
But, in my case the iMac G5 400MHz PC3200 RAM is also DDR, like the 333MHz PC2700 RAM in the MDD. And DDR memory is backward compatible to other DDR memories, that is why it worked.
I today recapped my Quicksilver AcBel 344W PSU. But no joy. It tries to start but only manages to move the PSU fan slightly. No output whatsoever. I measured all suspect resistors and diodes I could see and they seemed ok. So, the problem is somewhere deep in it and I will pretty much give up for now. I need to watch few more how to troubleshoot and repair your PSU -videos to figure out where to go next. 
Meanwhile, I am waiting for a 20->24 pin ATX-cable which I will make a conversion cable out of and try to get my old ATX-psu to run with the QS.
Meanwhile, I am waiting for a 20->24 pin ATX-cable which I will make a conversion cable out of and try to get my old ATX-psu to run with the QS.
Back home for a couple of days, so have got my hands on the new-to-me 12" Powerbook G4.
It runs 10.5.8 well from an 80GB HDD. Condition is certainly "used", but it has a very healthy battery, which is a huge bonus. It seems to do everything more 'normally' than the 17" A1107. For example, I cannot plug a mouse into the 17 once it has fired up and expect it to work. It must be plugged in before boot. Stuck a mouse dongle into the 12 and off it went. I wonder, then, if this one will boot from USB?
Having set the 12 up to my liking and installed iWork '08, I decided to try something I've not done before.
Because I've had absolutely no luck getting Leopard onto the 17 by any means, I thought I would try a restore to it using TDM. Over FW400, this isn't a swift process, but it does seem to be working. Watch this space...
This 12 is nice. As it isn't likely to be used on-line much, I thought I might actually use it for word processing etc. It certainly seems to run well at basic stuff.
Voila, all ready.
Like the 2017 Retina iMac, I'll not do anything to this machine until I have no option. It is certainly not as easy to get into as the 17, if iFixit instructions are to be believed...
It runs 10.5.8 well from an 80GB HDD. Condition is certainly "used", but it has a very healthy battery, which is a huge bonus. It seems to do everything more 'normally' than the 17" A1107. For example, I cannot plug a mouse into the 17 once it has fired up and expect it to work. It must be plugged in before boot. Stuck a mouse dongle into the 12 and off it went. I wonder, then, if this one will boot from USB?
Having set the 12 up to my liking and installed iWork '08, I decided to try something I've not done before.
Because I've had absolutely no luck getting Leopard onto the 17 by any means, I thought I would try a restore to it using TDM. Over FW400, this isn't a swift process, but it does seem to be working. Watch this space...
This 12 is nice. As it isn't likely to be used on-line much, I thought I might actually use it for word processing etc. It certainly seems to run well at basic stuff.
Voila, all ready.
Like the 2017 Retina iMac, I'll not do anything to this machine until I have no option. It is certainly not as easy to get into as the 17, if iFixit instructions are to be believed...
Yes the PB G4 12” is indeed a good machine. I bought one new and used it as my work laptop until 2009.
It's not that it's not easy to get into, it's that an overwhelming majority of fix-up or upgrade tasks require basically a full disassembly every time.
Wanna swap the hard drive? Full disassembly. Wanna swap the optical drive? Full disassembly. Wanna upgrade the RAM? Well at least that has a door on it, but if you're planning on swapping the thermal pads good luck!
Anyway, my 12 was a pretty neat machine until the GPU gave up the ghost. Enjoy yours while you can
It was mostly last night, but I was using Scrivener on my G5 while inebriated to finish writing a blog post I had on the back burner for a while. I made final touches to it earlier and it's finally published.
What version of firmware do these Macs have?
In the List of Open Firmware versions at
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...l-work-in-a-beige-power-macintosh-g3.2303689/
you can see that Apple disabled USB booting around August 25, 2004.
If you have a Mac/firmware combo not in that list, then consider posting a dump of the ROM using
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...3.2303689/page-38?post=33883037#post-33883037
USB booting can be re-enabled using a nvramrc script:
https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?thr...-booting-from-usb-from-the-boot-picker.48601/
Thanks, that's interesting. Off house-sitting somewhere else for three weeks on Monday, and will be taking both machines along.
Managed to clone the 12 to the 17 via TDM, after three attempts.
Over the course of the day yesterday, I managed to upgrade an external eSATA 500GB drive to a 2TB external eSATA drive, on my Power Mac G5 (Air) Quad.
Since both drives are G-Tech Q-Drives (support four external interfaces: eSATA, FW400, FW800, USB2.0) I plugged the new 2TB drive in initially via FW800, so that I could copy the content of the 500GB drive to the 2TB drive. I would then swap them out, with the 2TB drive moving to the faster eSATA interface and the 500GB drive going to the FW800 interface.
This may be of some interest to this community because I used the last version of the Forklift file manager that runs on PPC (3.91 I *think*, but I am not at my machine right now) to facilitate the transfer. There was one particularly large folder, weighing in at 1.86GB. Forklift faithfully copied over the entire thing until the very end, at which point it seemed to lose its mind. It started telling me that I had thousands of GB left to copy and the progress bar went wild. I watched it for a few seconds and then, scared of what it might actually be doing, I killed it.
What it actually was doing, it would seem, was deleting what it had just copied! After I killed it, four of the copied folders, among them the large one mentioned above, had been deleted irretrievably - they did not go to the Trash; they were just gone!
SO... the moral of this story is: if you are doing really large copies, you might want to avoid Forklift PPC!
Since both drives are G-Tech Q-Drives (support four external interfaces: eSATA, FW400, FW800, USB2.0) I plugged the new 2TB drive in initially via FW800, so that I could copy the content of the 500GB drive to the 2TB drive. I would then swap them out, with the 2TB drive moving to the faster eSATA interface and the 500GB drive going to the FW800 interface.
This may be of some interest to this community because I used the last version of the Forklift file manager that runs on PPC (3.91 I *think*, but I am not at my machine right now) to facilitate the transfer. There was one particularly large folder, weighing in at 1.86GB. Forklift faithfully copied over the entire thing until the very end, at which point it seemed to lose its mind. It started telling me that I had thousands of GB left to copy and the progress bar went wild. I watched it for a few seconds and then, scared of what it might actually be doing, I killed it.
What it actually was doing, it would seem, was deleting what it had just copied! After I killed it, four of the copied folders, among them the large one mentioned above, had been deleted irretrievably - they did not go to the Trash; they were just gone!
SO... the moral of this story is: if you are doing really large copies, you might want to avoid Forklift PPC!
I.... don't know why you wouldn't just
Or like, Disk Utility? It's there for this exact purpose?
I don't know what Forklift is so for that reason I wouldn't've trusted it with my data anyway.
dd the old drive onto the new drive.Or like, Disk Utility? It's there for this exact purpose?
I don't know what Forklift is so for that reason I wouldn't've trusted it with my data anyway.
Well folks (@barracuda156, @Doq ), Forklift is anything but ancient, and it is a whole lot more than an FTP Client. I have been using it for twenty years, and it remains current and evolving to this day. I use it pretty much every day.
What is it? Forklift is a full featured, dual pane file manager that happens to also support FTP, SMB and much more. Do yourself a favor and have a look at it.
What is it? Forklift is a full featured, dual pane file manager that happens to also support FTP, SMB and much more. Do yourself a favor and have a look at it.
I try to avoid anything non-open-source which is reasonably avoidable. Thankfully, FileZilla exists, so I do not need a proprietary alternative.
I'm good, I've had my fair share of midnight commander clones. My weapon of choice is Krusader.
I should see if it'll build on Ports.
UPD. A bit newer version is available as `viu` port (rename by the upstream, it is the same developer). Either should work at the moment.
I have this model, it's more of a PITA than difficult... the best bet is to upgrade it all in one go so you don't have to tear it apart every time. It's stacked like a sub sandwich, everything is on top of each other like layers.
Indeed, I have that same plan for a 2017 4K iMac. But are there any upgrades beyond HDD to SSD? RAM already maxed.
I finally decided to fix the configuration of windowmaker on my PowerBook running Tiger. I need to find a way to take screenshots on-device instead of using my iPhone (scrot doesn't exist on MacPorts and xwd doesn't capture the applications).
Finally got around to doing the upgrade, my first PPC SSD upgrade project in a long time. This was one of the more frustrating ones, however. Not iBook G3 bad, but close. Getting to the HDD wasn't hard, but pulling it out was. I finally got it out, but not without bending some of the metal where the optical drive screws in. Speaking of which, I accidentally bent the IDE pins on both the optical drive's adapter board (there's a detachable adapter that converts IDE laptop drives to a desktop-esque IDE connector, though this desktop IDE connector is way narrower than your standard desktop IDE connector) and on the logic board's IDE connector for the optical drive. Every time I bent the pins back, pushing the cable in would cause them to be bent again. This resulted in not being able to boot from a CD because the installer would either freeze at the Apple logo or I would get the flashing floppy disk icon. At one point in the process, a pin on the adapter board snapped off, leaving me with no optical drive at all. At least now, I don't have to move the drive bezel to access the optical drive anymore (the bezel snapped off during shipping, along with a good portion of the beige plastic backing, so I have it kept in place by taping it to the case).
As for the SSD side of things, that was frustrating too. Would have saved myself a lot of aggravation had I read up on the 6 GB boot partition limitation. Testing out a different SSD, buying another IDE to SATA adapter, all for nothing. Though I do like this second adapter, a Kingwin from Amazon, more than the first, since I can plug the HDD molex connector straight in instead of having to use one of those y-cables to go from floppy berg to standard molex. Have to say this was the cheapest upgrade project I've ever done since I already had spare SSDs, so all I had to buy was an IDE to SATA adapter and even then Amazon let me use my Hilton Honors points to cover the cost of both adapters. As for performance, better than the OG HDD. I tried out OS 9, Panther and Tiger. Due to the Optical drive situation and not being able to boot from a USB CD-RW drive, I had to put the SSD I wanted to use in my late 2009 Mac Mini (which wasn't being used for anything), throw it into Target Disk Mode, hook it up to my iBook G3 and use Carbon Copy Cloner to put an OS on the SSD. Tiger performs the slowest, it actually froze up before it even got to the desktop the first time I booted it, but it succesfully booted subsequent times. Panther was faster, but it is limited to youtube-dl which seems to be having an issue where it won't download because YouTube wants you to be signed in to "make sure you're not a bot." OS 9 performed the best. I tested out some videos, some of which I had downloaded before hand and others I downloaded when I was running Tiger and it seems that 240p MPEG 1 is the best for this Mac. Also, OS 9's QuickTime is better for playback, despite not being able to go full screen. On Panther/Tiger, simple things like moving the mouse or changing the volume while watching full screen can make the video stutter. Windowed mode is better. File conversion works well, even on Tiger. Right now I have a dual boot of OS 9 and Tiger. I can read application CDs using my USB CD-ROM drive, but not boot from it or play music CDs for some reason, so I may have to look into a logic board and laptop to desktop IDE optical drive adapter board swap at some point.