The Geek Son

It’s been over a year (maybe a year and a half?) since I last visited my parents’ place. After a few days of relaxing and being pampered with good food and some much needed time off, I knew what lay ahead.

My parents’ Macintosh, a Dual G4 / 450.

Largely used for e-mail and web-surfing these days (and maybe an occasional venture into MS Word), this machine was my main workhorse from 2000 – 2003. I’d upgraded its RAM to 960MB, added an Nvidia 64MB video card and an extra hard drive during those years, before handing it off to my parents. (This machine replaced their decrepit Performa 6500 running Mac OS 9, which I now have in the closet of my old room. Anyone want a Performa?)

The last time I visited, I upgraded their Mac to Tiger. This time, I decided to throw caution into the wind and upgrade their Mac to Leopard. (Side note: On a whim, I noticed that their Mac was only running one processor instead of two – pressing the CUDA switch on the Mac’s motherboard seemed to fix the problem – both processors are now recognized. Double side note: The machine is caked with dust.)

But Leopard doesn’t run on anything less than an 867MHz G4 processor, you say. And while that is indeed the official party line from Apple, through the magic of the Internet I was able to make the impossible possible.

As I type this, I’m running Software Update to bring their Mac up to snuff. Leopard seems to run nicely on this Mac. The ulterior motive for me to put Leopard on this machine in the first place is for having access to the new ScreenSharing feature, whereby I can control and observe their Mac from home without resorting to much aggravation on my part.

This will save me a lot of pain and agony in the long run (if it works).

Once I run all the updates, I plan to migrate Mom and Dad’s accounts over to the Leopard partition and verify that all their apps and data have made it over safely. Otherwise, I’ll never hear the end of it…

Just another day in the life of a geek son.

–Krishna

Krishna June 22, 2008