‘In the last episode we discovered what lurked at the back of some charity shops, you left me as I heard the glorious chimes of an Apple OS booting,’
I had power to my new purchase but my next issue was being able to login. I had been provided with no login information and phoning the shop would unlikely help, as I’m not sure they even knew what they had sold me. I did however know that I would be able to access the OS via terminal (don’t worry about this if you don’t know what I’m talking about). My first thing though would be to just check the original user hadn’t used some easily obvious password.
The former owner was a football fan (looking at his login Avatar) and the clue for his login password was ‘Football club’ so I just listed some of the local favourites, Celtic FC got me in. Just a little Tech hint it’s 2019 you should all know by now how to create secure passwords.
Once logged on I went to admin and created a new account for me, I then deleted the old users account. I must admit he/she did leave a bit too much personal information on, lucky it was me that got this and not someone who could have used that data. Tech hint number 2 if you’re going to sell or hand on an old computer wipe your hardrive and restore the item to factory settings.
I then had a chance to look at what my £10 had bought. So what I had was a 1.8 Ghz Power PC G5 with 256mb of Ram running OS 10.4 Tiger. Obviously the Specs arent going to blow anyones socks off. It was the last of Apple’s Power PCs a quick glance on ebay at the sold items told me they were going for around £40. I though don’t want to sell it I want to use it.
I have quite a good amount of useful Apple software from when I was a Mac user previously. The first thing I needed to do was upgrade the RAM as it was deadly slow running 256Gb. I could upgrade to the lofty heights of 2GB which would be perfectly adequate for what I needed. A little search around and we found a good U.K seller on ebay selling the required amount of RAM. It was used but only cost £7.99 for 2Gb of RAM, considering the amount memory is going for that was a good deal. You always need to be careful buying tech stuff on ebay but if you’re careful and check everything out good deals can be had.
The RAM arrived a couple of days later, this model of iMac is the easiest to install it, you just loosen a couple of screws and slip the back off and its an easy job to slot the RAM in. Booting up again there was an instant huge increase in speed. So we were ready for the software and to get using this iMac.
‘In the final installment I go through the software I have installed, how I’m using it and the performance of this 15 year old machine.’
Previous Episodes: The Perfect Blogging Computer, my £10 iMac -Episode 1
The Perfect Blogging Computer, my £10 iMac -Episode 2
