Posts Tagged ‘mac’

So today I was in charge of an e-waste recycling program for an office park. There were 2 large bins that were filled over the brim with a whole lot of really old, crappy, obsolete technology. There was a plethora of Palm Pilots, a multitude of monitors, a pile of printers, a ton of towers, wads of wires… (I can’t keep that up) …cell phones, zip drives, speakers, toner cartridges, internal and external drives, hard drives, keyboards, all dusty, dirty, old and otherwise useless.

Not so much that I was expecting to find anything great in there, but more out of general curiosity, I had a little look through. Besides looking fondly at old stuff that reminded me of other times (the Motorola StarTac phone totally made me think of an old boss), you never know when an extension cord might come in handy. Or a spare speaker. Or a macbook.

Yep, I found myself a perfectly (almost) operational macbook! It’s an older one (G3, 500mhz), but not too old to at least use as a basic netbook. There was no AC adapter, so I wasn’t sure if it would work, but I got it to a friend with an adapter and it booted up, right to a password protected login screen. So, one adapter (ordered) and one OSX Tiger disc (got a friend who has one) later and I’ve got myself a new toy.

UPDATE: So the AC adapter came in the mail, I learned how to get past the password screen, deleted the other user accounts, and checked around the new machine. It’s running 10.3 Panther. There’s no built in wifi & the battery lasts about 5 minutes. It has a 600mhz processor and 256mb of ram. So really in order for this thing to be the slightest bit useful, I’m going to need a USB wifi receiver and a new battery, plus upgrade the OS to 10.4 in order to be able to run the latest iTunes and Firefox. And maxing out the memory to 1gb couldn’t hurt. If I do all of this, my new free laptop is going to wind up costing around $200.