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Old hardware punishes me

27 05 09 - 20:26 I'm not talking about like, five years old, either. So my first fun of the day involved a couple of ancient Macs. One was a G3 he had somehow messed up the resolution on so the monitor was all crazy-crazy. Yes, a G3. A BEIGE G3. Manufacture date of 12/2/98. Yes, the year Windows 98 was all the rage. Well, I raged at it. Well, not really, even then I was too busy having fun with my Mac to consider windows. It only took about three minutes to boot. He said the modem didn't work anymore. I untangled the mess of cords he had on the desk and plugged it in, it seemed fine. Baka. You should see computer room this guy has. It's like a museum. A dirty, unorganized Mac museum, cables everywhere, unidentified parts in boxes, I even found an old SCSI 2 CD-R drive under the desk. Ugg. I pity the family that must go in there when he dies and rent a dumpster, and basically just gut that room of all its worthless junk and dump it in the dumpster. I mean the guy had a 28.8 modem sitting there. I had a flashback to the late 80s, it wasn't pretty.

His "main" machine is also a joke. Just for fun, let's pull out my iPod touch. My iPod touch is not only faster, clock speed wise then this machine, it also has more storage space. Here's a tip, people. If I can buy what is basically a TOY that has more computing power then is on your desk, it's past time to get a new machine. He said someone else had been working on the machine and after that it got all messed up. Of course, his OS X 10.2 CD was scratched up beyond belief, so I just upgraded him to 10.3 and that solved his issues. Except for the whole being slower then my iPod thing.

Next up was upgrading an XP machine to SP3. Really held my breath on that one*. It didn't even have SP1!!! So first I had to back up his music collection because he's too dumb to know how to save stuff in the event of a system crash. (No, really. I asked if he had a CD-RW and could he do it before I got there, to save both HIM and ME time and HIM money, but he said he didn't. When I got there, I realized not only did he have one, I had put it in at his request the last time I had been there) Then S-l-o-w-l-y load SP1 (because he only had USB 1 of course, go 10Mb/sec) then reboot, then slowly load SP3 and hope it reboots. I don't like doing service packs. I've seen too many machines not come back from one. But that one worked. He wanted a new version of iTunes, which requires at least SP2, that's why the whole risk it thing. Seesh, just get a Mac, would ja? At least that one wasn't hard, just tedious. I felt like this

Then good old Andre who I spoke of in my last entry. His power supply had fried. (which somehow took out his PS/2 ports as well, neither the mouse or keyboard worked) I replaced it, gave him another mouse, and told him in no uncertain terms to go immediately and get a UPS before his house takes out another machine. At least he finally dropped Juno (yes, juno) for RR. Honestly.

Made my calls for tonight, now I think I'll draw a panel for the comic and maybe play some Fallout 3. Have a pickup of a laptop for tomorrow and one other one in the afternoon. Another ancient Mac, an eMac this time that I think has RAM issues. They're only six years old, or maybe 8, depending on when she bought it. Ugg.

*As a point of interest, my best ever breathhold time right now is 2:42. Beat that! HA!