Desktop Power Macs are certainly the easiest to upgrade beyond just installing more memory or RAM. My dad and I both upgraded older Power Mac G4s recently, and our experience is telling. My dad has a 450 MHz Power Mac G4 (known as the “AGP Graphics” version); mine is a backup and file server with a 350 MHz G4 (“PCI Graphics” model).
If you recall a column last month, my father was considering a new computer, possibly an iMac or even a Power Mac G5. But the cost seemed too high to justify for his needs, which includes Web design using Adobe Photoshop and GoLive. The latest versions of both programs were lagging on his older machine, which had a slow hard drive and only a few hundred megabytes of RAM. My server has an increased backup load that it’s only barely able to handle.
We both opted to swap in more memory, a faster and bigger hard drive and a processor upgrade. A processor upgrade card has a CPU on it that replaces the function of the built-in processor, boosting the system’s computational power. Apple’s support for such CPUs is non-existent. You have to rely on the company and hope for the best (and consult the Web) as Apple ships new versions of Mac OS X.
Sonnet Technology offers an enormous array of upgrades for older and newer systems, including 15 for G3- and G4-based Macs. My dad and I both purchased similar 800 MHz G4 upgrades. My dad’s hardest task wasn’t installing the hard drive (a few cable confusions there), memory, or the processor card. It was duplicating the contents of his internal drive to his new drive, which he installed in a second-drive position inside the case.
He wound up using Dantz Retrospect Desktop backup software, but it didn’t seem to set all of the file permissions correctly so that he could simply boot from the new drive. This is a typical problem. One trick, which helped him partly, was to run Disk Utility (found in every Mac OS X system’s Utilities folder, inside the Applications folder) and choose Repair Disk Permissions for the new volume.
My upgrade is still under way. I failed to install Mac OS 9 drivers the last time I installed Mac OS X from scratch on this computer a year ago after a hard-drive failure. I needed to boot from Mac OS 9 to install a firmware upgrade for the Power Mac to recognize its new processor. The excellent technical support staff at Sonnet responded quickly to a Web form about this and another problem, providing the precise solution, which I still need to implement.
My dad spent a total of $522 through careful shopping for 1.2 GB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and an 800 MHz G4 processor. A new Power Mac G4 from Apple would cost well over $1,500 for about 50 percent faster performance. Power Macs with as much oomph as my dad’s souped-up model run about $900 on eBay. If you’re not a do-it-yourselfer, you might be able to pay an hourly rate to a local Apple consultant or retailer to handle the hardware swap.
The latest security update: As you may be aware, AirPort and AirPort Extreme networks have a built-in system that lets you encrypt or scramble the data that’s sent between a base station (the central AirPort hub) and each connected machine, protecting your traffic from snoopers. However, this scrambling method, known as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), has well-known flaws that could allow someone equipped with a cheap laptop, a wireless card and freely available cracking software to monitor your network and extract the encryption key, although for home users that might require the cracker to capture your network’s data for days or weeks.
The replacement for WEP, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), started becoming available in July. Apple added support for this much more robust encryption method in Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) for AirPort Extreme Cards and AirPort Extreme Base Stations a few months ago. In January, Apple released the AirPort Software 3.3 package, available from its site or through Software Update, which updates the firmware in the original AirPort Card to support WPA as well. Older AirPort Base Stations can’t be used with this newer standard; their innards aren’t up to the task, unfortunately.
Everyone who currently uses AirPort’s encryption system should immediately update to WPA, which allows the same simple pass phrases (letters, numbers and some punctuation) to be used to secure the network. Before switching to WPA, remember that every connecting computer needs to be running Mac OS X 10.3 with a patched AirPort, AirPort Extreme or third-party Wi-Fi card, or Windows XP with the separately installed WPA patch and Wireless Rollup installed.