Mac Modding

Last year I purchased a 350mhz blue and white g3 tower on eBay for 75 dollars. Despite being over five years old, the machine still proves to be very usable with a few minor upgrades that apple never intended you to do. First off, I replaced the anemic Rage II graphics card that was included with my version. My Mac led its previous life as a school computer, and its much faster rage 128 pro was replaced with a slower card that supported video capture, and had the old 15 pin apple monitor connector that was used from 1986 to 1997. I purchased a Pci Radeon 7000 and downloaded pciextreme, which allows CoreGraphics to be enabled on pci based Macs. Last week, I spent another $75.00 on a G4 zif CPU card that was pulled from a "yikes" Powermac G4, the red-headed stepchild of the G4 based powermac family. A firmware patch from Sonnett allowed this processor to work on my blue and white G3, which had basically the same motherboard as the Yikes, but with an ADB port. I also set the CPU jumpers to 4.5x which allowed the processor to be overclocked to 450MHZ. Os X Panther works stunningly, almost as fast as some of the Other AGP Powermacs that I have used. It is amazing that a product as old as this still manages to be as easy to upgrade as it is. Show me a PC from 1999 that can run iTunes on Windows XP without a hiccup. That's right, you cant, they are all in landfills or in the classroom at the Hershey Montessori Farm School. And even those can barely run microsoft word without bricking up constantly.