A Shot in the Arm
This afternoon's outing to Sim Lim Sqaure started out with a simple statement a few days ago: "You Mac needs more RAM."Though Otterman had bestowed the coveted road warrior status on his G4 iBook, it is his trusty Dual G4 MDD he employs to pick up the slack. Watching him flog this machine daily, it is evident that his Dual G4 has legs to grow yet.
The G4 MDD, or Mirrored Drive Doors, is considered one of the last great uber-expandable desktop Macs, Apple has ever designed. It can hold up to 4 gigabytes of RAM, two CD drives, four hard drives and four PCI slots for an assortment of Firewire, SATA, USB or video capture cards. Not even Apple's current G5 towers can compete in this arena of expandability.
And it seemed that after three plus years of continous use, albeit one or two trips to the Apple service centre, it was time to give this workhorse a shot in the arm.
Price fixing was done via Hardwarezone. This website lists everything sold at Sim Lim Square and for those who don't fancy the idea of wandering around aimlessly or being overwhelmed by the myriad of offers, you can call up the items you want and call the store before going down.
In the end, after much walking, taxi-riding and elbow grease, Otterman's MDD is now a capacious beast given his requirements for storage and application use with one exception though.
While we have seen third party CPU upgrades offered for the previous G4 desktops, there is currently none to be had for our MDDs. I hope that this would be addressed eventually. Even though Apple has inked the shift to Intel's Core Duo processors, Freescale had sinced announced the latest MPC7448 CPU to be delivered. This would extend the life of legacy hardware users for a couple of years yet.
posted by Teutoburg @ 9:52 PM
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