Recently, I was given a Mac G4 to replace the ancient PowerMac 9600 I had (that was incapable of running OS X). Now with the G4, I can finally learn the ins and outs of OS X. For a guy who used to work for Apple as a Windows/PC-basher, it’s been humbling.

Since the computer lacked its original discs, I didn’t have a way to update it or boot from CD should something go wrong. Thank you to all the people who offered me their old OS X discs.

Major kudos to Kevin S. for the computer. I can’t thank you enough.

And major kudos to Aaron M., my old drumming buddy, for coming through not only with a OS X Tiger DVD, but also a DVD-ROM drive! I did not expect that last piece in the puzzle at all.

A memory store online was blowing out RAM, so I got an additional 512K for an exceptional price. Yesterday, I transferred my old second hard drive into the new Mac and it mounted, so I’m good to go!

If anyone’s got any suggestions on free essential software, I’m listening.

Thanks again!

(One open question for OS X gurus: My old drive I took out of my 9600 will mount its two partitions on the desktop; I can access them and move files between them and the G4s original drive. But for some reason, when I’m in an application, I can’t save from that application to the old drive’s partitions because the partitions don’t show up in the drop-down “Save As…” menu. Is there a trick to get the computer to display them from within an app’s “Save As…” menu? Big thanks to anyone who can answer this. I tried Googling for an answer, but have come up short. Oh, and the computer’s still running OS 10.2.8. I’m not going to switch over to 10.4.X until I’ve got the hang of the file system in OS X and can rest assured that formatting the original hard drive will go the way I want it to.)