Bobbis.net

My mother-in-law brought her Quicksilver G4 to our place Monday evening to download and install months worth of updates. She is on dialup and doesn't have the most reliable connection, so trying to download all the updates would take forever. She also lives out in the country on a gravel road in an old house. The computer was really dusty.

So, after a good go at it with the canned air, I had to cobble together a display, keyboard, mouse and network for it. The machine doesn't have bluetooth, and the only working mice in the house were bluetooth. I didn't have a VGA monitor easily available, so I ended up hooking it up to my TV's computer input. I used a Dell keyboard and had to make an old Microsoft wireless RF mouse work again by cleaning out the leaked battery crap on the contacts.

To get networking to it (it didn't have AirPort), I figured I could steal the ethernet from the Mac Mini. The cable couldn't reach with the setup, so I pulled out a switch and another cable to make it reach only to find out the ethernet port was not working. I plugged the ethernet back into the Mini and pulled out a long FireWire cable and turned on Internet Sharing on the Mini. Yay, I've got Internets on the G4! Updates installed quickly and she whent home with an updated machine.