"This Old Mac"
  06/15/2000

Apple would like nothing more than to sell you a shiny new computer, and Apple's marketing machine is charged with keeping those colored confections from filling up valuable warehouse space. It is finally possible to buy a bright new iMac for under a thousand bucks, but that is still a lot of money to the rest of us. So if your assets are tied up in strategic investments like ostrich meat futures or your kid's teeth, what do you do when your machine finally grinds to a crawl under the weight of bloatware or dies altogether?

Consider the used Mac market. Even without a huge marketing machine to tout its virtues, there is a vibrant resale market out there for everything Macintosh. CPUs, parts, peripherals: they are all available on the Web with a few clicks and a little patience.

The first place to look when comparing hardware is Apple's Web site support area, which hosts the technical specifications of every Mac ever manufactured. While the glossy marketing materials for old Macs have long since vanished, it is still easy to find out what is inside that beige case. Another good source for information on older machines is lowendmac.com. The site contains a large helping of advice on which machines perform and which ones experience has proven to be lemons, plus links to used parts and CPUs.

There are other places to get help besides the Web. Recently my ancient Quadra 840av's hard drive seized with a groan. Finding an inexpensive 3 gigabyte drive with original Apple ROMs was as easy as posting a few e-mails to my user group's mail list. Within a day I had replaced the drive, and the old workhorse was back on its feet.

And do not overlook Usenet. A few weeks ago I found myself the owner of a recently retired LaserWriter IINT. Within a few hours of posting a message in comp.sys.mac.printers, I had a copy of the service manual, take-apart instructions, names of several dealers of used printer parts, and several suggestions to upgrade the motherboard to a faster model.

With the transition from older interfaces like SCSI and serial to Firewire and USB, there are plenty of opportunities to locate discount peripherals that may be only a few years old, most likely because their owners have upgraded to new CPUs. If you have a stack of peripherals already, upgrading to the newest model CPU may be impossible without replacing a lot of other hardware. Consider upgrading the processor instead. Most pre-G3 PCI PowerMacs have several processor upgrades to choose from. I have been using a Sonnet G3 in a PowerMac 6500 for nearly a year without any problems whatsoever.

I do not know a die-hard Mac user who does not yearn for the latest and fastest machine Apple makes. Lucky for us, however, there is an array of choices for reinventing your old Mac and improving performance, without cashing in those ostrich meat futures that will pay off any day now.

  - by Robert DeLaurentis