"New" computer - and it's totally alien to me...

[Gewehr98]

I *believe* it's actually the Super Drive being a pain in the a**.  I can get OS 9.2 to boot, but it crashes halfway through the screen where the icons start filling in the lower left corner of the screen.  Wiggling the power connector to the Super Drive causes the power supply to shut down, then initiate a reboot.

Same goes for the OS X 10.2 bootable install CD, it gets to a certain point then crashes.  I'm going to yank another CD-ROM drive out of one of my PCs and see if the Mac will finish a CD boot sequence next.  Otherwise, it could also be the type of PC100 memory I installed. 

[Monkeyleg]

Gewehr98, you're mixing memory cards, and CD drives?

Mac's are Mac's, and PC's are PC's. They, like Germans and French, were never meant to intermingle.

[RadioFreeSeaLab]

His G4 uses standard IDE drives and normal pc-100 memory.  He should be fine.

[Monkeyleg]

Dasmi, when you're finished fixing Geweher's G4, could you please come over and look at mine?

[RadioFreeSeaLab]

Sure.  We'll discuss my hourly rate in a private message

[lee n. field]

Sure.  We'll discuss my hourly rate in a private message

Don't forget travel time.  Portal to portal.    Ka-CHING!

[mfree]

Try holding the windows key down. That maps to the apple key when using a PC keyboard on a mac (like I'm doing right now).

[Manedwolf]

Gewehr98, you're mixing memory cards, and CD drives?

Mac's are Mac's, and PC's are PC's. They, like Germans and French, were never meant to intermingle.

That hasn't really been true since the late 90's. All the desktops for many years now use standard memory, standard hard drives, standard expansion cards including video cards, etc...

[Monkeyleg]

[Emily Latella voice] Never mind. [/Emily Latella voice]

[Gewehr98]

Update:

Swapped out 512K of new memory, and swapped out the CD/DVD drive.

The system tries to boot off OS 9.2, OS X Panther, or OS X Tiger.   All crash after reading the drives a bit, sometimes giving an error window and calling for a reboot. 

I'm going to test the voltage on the montherboard's battery, and reset the PRAM next.

This is frustrating.

[Gewehr98]

End of saga.

I traded it off last week to the sysadmin at my wife's Budweiser distributorship - he had a spare Tektronix Phaser 780 he wasn't using, and it actually works. 

Someday I'll try one again.  Not too soon, though.   

[Silver Bullet]

Wish I'd seen this thread when it first came around.

I dunno about PowerMac G4, but when I was researching G3 iMacs, I came across this little item:

http://db.tidbits.com/article/06973

which describes a nasty bug beyond anything I've ever seen for a Mac:  when you upgrade the OS to the level of 10.2 (Jaguar), the firmware must be updated to 4.1.9 first OR ELSE the screen goes black and you have to jump through some hoops to regain control.

[Sindawe]

I dunno about PowerMac G4, but when I was researching G3 iMacs, I came across this little item:

http://db.tidbits.com/article/06973

which describes a nasty bug beyond anything I've ever seen for a Mac:

From the link above: "Under no circumstances should you let a dealer convince you that your iMac's motherboard must be replaced. Motherboard replacement was initially Apple's official solution to this problem; however, now that the issue has been more thoroughly identified, Apple dealers now have access to information about it how to recover iMacs without replacing the motherboard. If your dealer isn't yet aware of it, ask them to look."

And some people say Microsoft is evil....

[Silver Bullet]

And some people say Microsoft is evil....

Well, I haven't said that ... yet.

But, in the case of the link, I don't think the Apple dealers were evil.  I think they were just uninformed of the actual cause and remedy of the problem.

[Gewehr98]

Apple is indeed evil.  Check out the latest "oops" regarding their newest iProduct, the iPhone, and the soldered-in iBatteries:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19627590/wid/11915829?GT1=10150

Just waiting for Sony to clone it, albeit in an even better version, and I'll wager they make the batteries user-replaceable.   

[Silver Bullet]

You gotta be kidding.  Sony has been on a long decline, from what I hear and from my own consumer electronics experience.  Regardless, they don't have the software cajones to clone an iPhone.

I read that the iPhone batteries are soldered in to achieve a certain form factor.  Nothing "evil".  The only entity I've seen complaining about that is some so-called "consumer group", not any of the iPhone owners.  My guess is that they're fishing for Microsoft "sponsorship", similar to SCO getting $400,000,000 "licensing" money from Microsoft, whereas in reality Microsoft was financing SCO to harass Linux companies.

Least ways, that's what I read on Slashdot.

What are you doing up so late ?