just got a mac (kind of)

well i finally somehow got a mac, all i know about it is that
It is a 15" Powerbook G4

I literally got it as i was leaving town so i havent had time to play with it?

I'm not sure the specs on it but it was free and I was told the only problem is that it has no hard drive, also there is no AC adapter.

What exactly is a Powerbook G4? i'm pretty sure it's the aluminum.

I know nearly next to nothing about apples. so

--edit-- oops somehow hit tab-save/post. continuing post --

what exactly do i need to do to get it running (assuming everything else works)

I need an AC Adapter
I need a hard drive, what kind of hard drive works, also is there a disassembly guide, what if the mounting screws are gone?
I need to buy OSX? Wil a powerbook g4 run OSX? Where does one even buy OSX? Is it expensive?

Im just a little weirded out being thrusted into the mac world, ill scrounge the forums for other things too.

thanks

 

AC adapter: check out eBay.
Hard Drive: Ask someone else.
OS X: The Apple Store. $69 if you qualify for the education discount and I believe $129 if you don't. The price points are for Tiger.

 

last power adapter i got on ebay fried my phone/battery.
i guess i'll just look for the specific apple brand on ebay.

how does the education discount work?


can this thing run world of warcraft?

 

I don't play games myself, but I believe the new intel ones do. Not sure about the powerbooks.

Basically you qualify for the education discount if you're one of the above:
-A k-12 Faculty or staff
-A college student at a civilian or military institution
-A graduate/professional student at a civilian or military institution
-A college/graduate/professional faculty/staff at a civilian or military institution

Then you go to the Apple Store for Education under "where to buy" at apple.com and click whatever your situation is.

If you:
-Work for the federal government in a civilian capacity
-Work for the federal government in a military capacity

then you qualify for the federal employee discount. I believe there is a separate program for state and local government as well. Go to the Apple Store for Government and click on whatever your situation is. Discounts can't be combined by the way. If you still don't understand it, go to the nearest Apple Store and ask about the education discount, or call 1800-780-5009 (Apple Store for Education)

 

http://support.apple.com/specs/

Go there. On the right you can enter your serial number. It should give you the specs. If we have that we can help you more. In general, a Powerbook G4 is pretty good, you should definitely be able to run Tiger, if it does not already have Tiger. But check out the specs and get back to us.

 

Yes, it will easily run WoW. I know people who have ibooks who play wow all the time.

I imagine that it can use any normal 2.5" IDE hard drive. You can get those on newegg.com (my personal recommendation) or some other plces.

 

If you haven't found the answer.. I have an old powerbook g4 (667) titanium that needed a new powersupply. you can get them from apple.. it's the same one they've made for years.. http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=31C2C4FE&nplm=M8943LL%2FA
Installing the OS is easy.. I belive you put in the cd and hold D while booting..or was it C.. it's easy though..nothing like windows machines and a boot disk.. drives., ya 2.5" ide atapi , Not SATA..that won't work, also make sure it's not bigger than 9.5mm thick. Most are fine. http://www.macmall.com/macmall/shop/detail.asp?dpno=7013612&Redir=1like this one.. but I wouldnt' worry about it being certified. This one just happens to be. I have Tiger running on my powerbook too, but I haven't gamed with it

If you want to look up your mac, try this http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g4/index-powerbook-g4.html

 

Don't be too hasty in proclaiming that it will, I'm not sure the earliest PBG4 models would be able to for example. They are over 5 years old after all.

Until we know exactly which model you have it's hard to say, so please do as adviced above and check with the specs page on the Apple website to find out what model you have (and in the case of gaming, what graphics card you have).

 

I looked up the serial, it's a 15" Aluminum Powerbook G4 with the 1GHZ processor

 

That means you should have an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM, which does seem to fit the minimum requirements of WoW (they just say any ATI or NVIDIA card with 32MB of VRAM or more), assuming you also have 512MB of RAM and OS X 10.3.9 or later.

 

all right, update time:

I bought a Hitachi Travelstar, installed it, installed OSX, got it running but it crashed while i was messing with it. I tried to reboot it but it hung on a blank grey screen.

Now I am trying to reinstall OSX from a cd package my friend gave me.
after the first cd runs and does it's thing it asks to reboot, when it reboots it just hangs on a grey screen with a grey apple. should i just wait longer?

I tried rebooting back to the first CD and ran disk utilites and it said the disk was corrupted (invalid node structure or something)

Think the cds are bad? Theyre copies, I don't want to buy a retail copy until i'm sure this book works, but I got it running once before, so if it sounds like the book can be saved I guess ill pick one up now.


i guess i'll zero out the hard drive and see what happens

 

Hey, i googled it for you "mac invalid node structure" and a lot comes up in various forums. I think Zero-ing the drive is a good idea and was recommended in several places..basically completely reformating and targeting bad sectors if possible. "Disk Warrior" is a program i saw several times.. If you still have trouble, check it out maybe. Do a final scan and repair and try to reinstall the OS one last time. PS. make sure your friends Disk isn't for the new IntelMacs, but I figure you already checked that. Good luck- Jimy

 

all right, i completely disassembled it, reassembled it, put on some fresh Arctic Silver compound and now it seems to be running all right, i'm currently posting on it right now. also, the disks i had were total crap, so i just went and picked up a copy of tiger hoping the laptop wasnt bricked, it installed but after some tweaking.

i'm still not sure if my hdd is bad, even though it is brand new, i still need to do a full scan.

the only problem right now is that the display is acting weird, the colors are kind of distorted, red specs appear everywhere, i'll try to take a photo of the screen sometime, but for now this mac thing is pretty sweet.

i'm thinking about getting a macbook if this turns out well