So this whole Mac experience has been a very interesting one. I’ll try to remain as objective as possible, and keep in mind that my experience has been with an older, used Mac that I won on eBay. A lot of this would have been much, much different had a bought a brand new one (the much larger dent in my wallet notwithstanding).
UPS delivered the weathered package Friday afternoon. I can't say if ups or my oh-so-attentive seller caused the package to be in such form, but it looked like they used it for a goal post in a soccer match. The computer was wrapped tightly in bubble-wrap and surrounded by packing peanuts. Needless to say, there was enough static electricity to make the hair on my neck tickle. Guess the previous owner never heard that static was bad for computers. That was probably taught on the same day as the perils of tobacco smoke. I’ve only run into one other computer that smelled this bad. Also, at this point I notice an alarming rattle in the case. More on that in a minute.
Installing memory, a DVD burner, USB 2.0 ports, wireless card - all fit neatly and just as they would in a pc. Of course, I’m speaking only of fitting and not of working. I’ll come back to those topics as I discuss the headaches they caused. However, at this point I discovered the cause of the rattle - the hard drive bracket was not screwed into the case. Easy fix thanks to my hottie of a helper who, having no formal training, was able to readily identify a case screw up request. Good job, baby!
So, now that I’ve got the new parts in (and the rattle solved), it's time to connect it up and power it on. Most pc's employ a direct connection from keyboard to computer and a direct connection from mouse to computer. Not apple - the USB cable on my mouse was about 3' long, so this wasn't an option. The idea is to connect the mouse to the keyboard (via one of 2 USB ports) and the keyboard to the computer (by way of the supplied USB extension cable). Different, but good (except for the case of high performance pointing devices). In my situation, it will do just fine. Other connections (power, vga, and network) were standard.
Turning it on was my first real trial. The power light would blink, but nothing would happen. I was very concerned at first - logically, I assumed incompatible upgrades or dead computer, so I removed them all and replace the apple parts. Same problem. After trying other power cables and outlets, devices connected and disconnected, and all sorts of voodoo, I located a handy little button on the main logic board that reset the CMOS battery. Power-on issue resolved, upgrades restored. Now, on to the OS
The previous owner was kind enough to create for me a clean profile with auto-login and a very helpful (dead giveaway) password hint. Still, it was very sluggish. At this point I also found out that the wireless card I bought wouldn't work due to a change in chipset (and Apple's limited support for wireless NICs). I thought it would be best to wipe it out and start from scratch - so I did. However, not until the OS was finished installing did I run into frustration number two: the Mac was supposed to come w/tiger (10.4) but he shipped it with jaguar (10.2). for those of you unfamiliar with Mac OS versioning, this is not like a PC where "point" releases are under the same main release - 10.2 is to 10.4 as windows 2000 is to windows vista. So, I was stuck with an out of date OS. Finally I decided that since I bid on and won a Mac w/tiger, I owned tiger, and could legally download it (with the licensure of the pre-installed tiger that was on the Mac before I wiped it out). Thus begins the next gigantic obstacle...
I couldn't find a DVD version of tiger in a timely fashion, so my only option was the 4-CD route. The CD's came in the form of ".dmg" images (native to Mac, gibberish to pc). After trying several ways to get the .dmg files burned to CD on my PC, I resorted to trying to burn them from the Mac. I had to get them transferred tothe Mac first. Network: nope. Wasn’t working. Still don't know why. Only option: USB hard drive. I formatted the USB hard drive to fat32 (yes, my USB drive is now partitioned), copied the files over, and transferred them to the Mac. Then I found out that the upgraded DVD burner I installed was not recognized by the Mac. Patchburn wouldn't solve the problem (because it's way outdated under jaguar) so I had only one option: put the old CD-RW drive in, and burn. That did the trick, and I was on my way to tiger bliss.
Now that tiger was installed (and I was networked via crossover cable to the PC), I could grab patchburn for tiger and get the DVD burner working. That was actually quite painless. Wireless, on the other hand, is tricky. See, apple doesn't support wireless NICs other than their own "airport" cards (or those which have the same chipset manufacturer - Broadcom). The airport option is, well, not really an option in my opinion. Installing an airport card in this computer would cost me $100 and limit me to .11b speeds. No way. I read many reports of people who are using Broadcom chipset based cards in their Macs and decided that was the way to go. Best Buy supposedly has one for $40, but when I got there, I found out that they had just released a newer version of said card and it no longer has the Broadcom chip. now I have to either track down a Broadcom based wireless NIC or shell out the dough for option number 3: a sonnet branded, Mac compatible PCI wireless NIC (close to the price of a stinking' airport card, but at least it's 11.g). For now, it's sharing my pc's wireless connection over a crossover cable.
So, it's working now. I’ve found some cool applications to make it do all the stuff I need, and I’m learning my way around and getting it tweaked how I want it. This whole process has been a blast. I miss the challenge of learning how to fix a computer and overcoming obstacles, incompatibilities, etc... It reminds me of cutting my teeth as a pc geek. So, for all the frustration, I’ve already learned a lot about fixing and working on the Mac platform as it pertains to slightly older setups. This ought to be useful (and gratifying) when I work my way up to the newer stuff. The last remaining problem is where I’m going to make up the 3 hours of sleep it cost me last night to stay up past my bed time and do all of this :)
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