The good and the bad of Macs

What has been a nice feature about Macintosh models is that with some minor upgrades (bigger hard drive, more memory), they can last a long time without seeming like a dinosaur. My Mom this year replaced her five year old PC which desperately needed it. In our lab, I'm hoping that a rezeroing of the hard drive and some new partitions will extend the life of a six year old G3 (the first blue tower model available).

The bad news is that some of the more convient features are only for the newer machines. For example, even though our blue tower HAS firewire built-in, it is unable to boot in what is called "Firewire Target Disk Mode". This feature is coming in handy for people who want to upgrade to Mac OS 10.4 and do not have a DVD drive built-in.

I know that in the computer world, machines have a finite lifespan. And I know that with each new writing of the software to integrate new hardware, it gets more and more difficult to support older hardware without major system problems. But give a little credit where credit's due - please help extend the life of perfectly good machines!!!

*sigh* So I'm going to have to transfer back 13GB of data the hard way. At least the rezeroing and repartitioning helped (so far). I was able to get OS 9.2.2 on it, which is an improvement from last week.