geek travels

After several years of trying to get my hands on an apple g4 cube I finally succeeded. (Yeah craigslist!) Its a g4 500mhz with 1.25gigs of ram. The 40gig harddrive it came with was very loud so I swapped in a 120gig drive. So why would I want such an old slow machine you ask? Well for starters it just looks cool. I don't know of any other desktop that I would actually put on my desk (rather then under my desk). But more importantly, the entire setup is completely silent. Unless its spinning a cd or dvd you would never know it was even on. Try turning your computer off. Isn't it amazing how quite it just got? Well the cube is like that all the time. My powerbook sounds like a hurricane in comparison.

Its already become my main machine (althought I'm keeping my powerbook in sync for when I travel). It performs amazingly well. Even though its only 500mhz it easily keeps up with my 867 powerbook. I think the faster harddrive (7200rpm vs 5400rpm) and the ram (1.25gig vs 768meg) makes a massive amount of difference. I spend most of my time in a terminal window, firefox or programming editor. Maybe if I were editing video or messing around in photoshop it would be a different story.

There are several cpu cards that will upgrade the cube to a 1.5ghz but I think I might pass on them for now. Not only are the expensive ($500) but they require a fan which defeats my whole justification for getting the cube. Otherwise I would just get a dual g5 tower and be done with it. I can still put in a little more ram and a better video card. At the moment I'm happy enough leaving it as is.