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Okay, one of my friends got a nice new Mac iBook and he gave me his G4 PowerMac. I plan to use it for recording music at the new place, and also as yet another redundacy in the blogging system. However, a lightning strike has fried the modem (he says everything else works).
My question is, is there anyway to set this up on the same wireless system as my PC and laptop, and if so, what kind of replacement modem/Ethernet card do I use to make it happen?
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You need to identify the PowerMac model more precisely. See this Apple document for instructions:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58418
As you can see in this doc, some PowerMacs support WiFi, others don’t.
Geoff
What Geoff said, with the caveat that any G4 can do wifi, but not always via actual Apple hardware. You absolutely can use the same wireless network regardless of the solution, but your options are varied:
1. If it’s one of the tower-type G4s, it may be able to take what Apple calls an “Airport card”– which is an Apple branded wifi which is unbelievably easy to set up. If it can’t, you can buy a PCI wireless card for about $40-60.
2. If it’s an iMac, Mini, or Cube, you have a choice of either getting an Airport card, or getting a USB wireless adapter, which is an inelegant solution, but works quite well, as my in-law’s iMac on the 2nd floor demonstrates.
Look at the pictures on say, lowendmac.com to figure out which model you have, and check out your options. If you decide to go the Airport card route, or if you want to look at music stuff (though Garageband is really, really good for a free program), go to Springboard Media at 22nd and Walnut, just before the Walnut Street Bridge. The owner’s name is Everett, and he’s an incredibly nice guy– tell him I sent you.
It’s the PCI Graphics tower model, M5183.
That’s an early one– they’re usually called “Yikes.” It’ll need a bit of upgrading to run Garageband well, though if you put OS9 on it it’ll run the free version of Power Tools quite well, and Audacity will run well on it as well. (You’re going to need either a USB settop device or an adaptor to get an XLR mike into it) It’s a perfectly usable machine (I’m typing this on a 400Mhz Sawtooth, which was the AGP one that replaced the Yikes.) but a little slow if you’re planning to do anything complicated with it, musically. (eg, it’ll do MIDI sequencing just fine, you can do multitrack audio recording on it pretty well– with a gig or so of RAM you should be able to do 12 tracks in Pro Tools Free, easy– but Garageband, with its sampled instruments, uses a lot of processing power. If, like I suspect, you’re planning to record vocals, acoustic guitar, and maybe a bit of bass, it’ll do fine.) I’ll be happy to help you set it up once you’re in the new place, if you want.
And as far as wifi on a Yikes, you’ll either need to buy a PCI card (Belkin sells one which will work with OSX that you can probably pick up at Staples for $40. If you’re planning on using OS9, you’ll need to poke around to find one that has drivers for OS9.) or get a USB wireless adapter. No Airport. Still remarkably easy to configure, though– should take about 10 minutes, tops.
The other thing to watch with that version is the size of hard disk that you can install. IIRC, it may not recognize anything bigger than 120GB.
congrats to your friend on his new iBook, and welcome to the Mac family.
Even if your Powermac is an oldie, and you’re only using it peripherally, it just makes my heart warm to hear about old Macs still out there plugging away.