After considering several options, I noticed that the old G4 Cubes are very inexpensive on eBay these days. Since I had a Cube before, I did bunches of upgrades to it - and so I know how to work on and in the machine - I decided to get another Cube for my backup. While buying all of the components for my "Super Cube" I decided to go ahead and get a second one for my mom. See, she has an Intel Pentium III machine that a friend gave her - a very nice gesture as it was a major hotrod in its day: Two HD's, two optical drives, &c. - but I haven't worked on a PC in about ten years, so when she gets stuck, I'm stuck!
Worked out perfectly. I actually bought three Cubes since they were so cheap and I wanted a machine to cannibalize for parts should something go wrong with one of the other two, and with all the extra memory, I was able to set mom up with a nice Cube with a lot of memory and a 17" TFT Studio Display (The largest display the stock Cube's graphic card can run). Those old 17" lucite displays are cheap now, so I bought two of those as well.
After upgrading the memory from the stock 128MB to 512MB I booted up the machine only to discover that the internal backup battery was dead. Ack! Well, better to start off with a fresh one anyway, so after a trip to Radio Shack I had mom's sexy machine up and running in the Hucbald Testing Laboratory.
I upgraded the OS to OS X 10.4.11 and ran Software Update to get her up to speed (I didn't think 10.5 would really give mom any advantages, and it's a memory hog). Then, I took it over and surprised mom with her new computer. She was tickled pink, and I felt like a good son: More than ample reward.
Of course, for the rest of the evening she was calling every fifteen minutes when she got stuck. LOL!
She's really cute - and she reminds me of a GF I had named Sydney - but her name is Georgia, so it could never work out. I like the name, but think about it: George and Georgia. See what I mean?
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