mike the mountain

Finally did it.

Susie (my 4 year old white G3 800mhz Apple iBook) was practically flatlining. Crashes, dropped wifi signals, major system lags… couldn’t even play videos without tons of choppy playback and dropped audio. Never mind the hard drive has been at 99.9% capacity (at least) for the past year (dang indie music blogs!).

I came very close to buying a whole brand spankin’ new macbook, but I just couldn’t justify the finances. And I knew that Susie still had life in her. So I maxed out the RAM a few months back (a whopping 640 megs!). Helped a little. I stripped everything I could off of her, keeping pretty much nothing but my music, photos, and e-mail (still had less than a gig of free space on the hard drive). Done everything I could think of to optimize the software. Still couldn’t even watch a clip on YouTube without it chopping out.

Time for more drastic measures.

I knew what I had to do. First things first: back everything up. Grabbed my backup drive, copied over all the files I wanted to keep. I already had .mac backing up a lot of my system settings and passwords, but just to be sure I wrote down all my essentials. A while ago I grabbed a copy of OS X 10.4, ie: Tiger. I put it in, my plan was to first do a “Archive and Install”, which preserves my current installation while making sure my Tiger install goes smoothly. No such luck unfortunately, some kind of error on my hard drive prevented me from doing anything but a complete erase/format. So with a prayer to the geek gods and a root beer sacrifice, I wiped Susie out and put a Tiger in her tank! (hard drive, whatever.)

So far so good, she’s running like a dream! I’m being very picky about what goes in here. Quicksilver and Firefox so far. I’m going to try and stay open source as much as possible. OpenOffice.org (or maybe NeoOffice), GIMP, and the granddaddy of them all: Linux.

And with all the love for Ubuntu these days (like the article below for example), and my own brief but very positive experience, I know exactly what I want to do to add another “personality” to my little white weapon!