Muscle Mac

My wife has been a computer maven for more than two decades. She purchased one of the earliest Apples and was very active in testing new educational software for companies that developed them. She also has become a good computer mechanic. Many people would donate old computers that no longer worked and she would fix them and give them to needy students or use them in her own or other teachers classrooms.

When I started cruising the internet, a couple years ago, I used an old Apple G-3 AV unit. It was a very powerful machine, in its day but very outdated. It was incapable of loading many very extensive websites and was very slow. Next I got a G-4. It has been very adequate for my purposes. Still a little slow and you don't want to surf too far from your starting point, or you could crash. These machines had the advantage of being absolutely free. I don't like to pay for anything, if I don't have to.

Now that Apple has gone to quad core Intel processors and has joined the speed wars, early G-5s are rapidly becoming obsolete. I just picked one up locally, on Craigs List, for a few hundred dollars. Even with it's paltry 1.6 GHz single processor, it should be several times faster than my G-4. It will support up to 4 GB of RAM, 4 times my current amount. It can also utilize a much faster wireless connection and has infinitely more connectability. Over the next few days, my wife will clean up this beauty, wipe the hard drive and install the applications I use. The hard drive sounds a little funny, it may need to be replaced.

Once it gets on line, I should be surfin' in style.