- Joined
- Aug 18, 2007
- Messages
- 715
- Reaction score
- 30
- Points
- 28
- Location
- Wilmington, NY
- Your Mac's Specs
- 15" Unibody MBP (2009), White MB (2009), iMac G4
Well the other day I was coming home from working on a job at a local hotel (I'm a custom cabinet maker) and a truly amazing thing happened. I was driving through a residential area when something caught my eye out by the road next to a garbage can. It was a very familiar silver tower computer. I immediately turned around and pulled over, and was amazed to see what looked to be either a PowerMac G5 or a Mac Pro sitting out by the sidewalk waiting to be thrown into the back of a garbage truck. It looked like it was in great shape, so I went up to the door and knocked. A nice lady answered and told me it was her husband's computer, and he had not been able to get it to boot for a long time, so had bought a new one. She said I could have it if I wanted, but her husband had removed the hard drive and she didn't know where the disks or anything were, but as far as she knew everything else was intact. I thanked her very much and loaded the computer into my car.
When I got home I immediately opened it up to look inside. Everything looked fine, all the parts were there except for a hard drive. I also discovered to my amazement that this was indeed an intel Mac Pro. I popped in a spare hard drive I had lying around and powered it up. Of course I got the flashing question mark, but it did power up fine. So I put in my Leopard DVD (I have the family pack, so far only installed on 3 Macs) and went to boot from it. Got the Apple logo but as soon as the wheel started turning it kernel panicked! My first instinct when this happens is to try swapping RAM around, in case there is a bad module. It had 2x1 GB of RAM installed, so I just took one of the modules out. Same problem. I switched it for the other one, and IT BOOTED! I installed Leopard without a hitch and it booted right up into the installation without issues. About this Mac shows that this has 2 x 3 Ghz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors, which I believe would make it a first generation Mac Pro. It has an ATI Radeon X1900 XT with 512 MB memory.
I have been playing around with this thing now for a couple days and I simply can not believe how lucky I am. It was like winning the lottery. I'm still not sure exactly what I am going to do with it, but this is just so amazing I can't stop looking at it!
For those who don't want to read my long post:
- Found Mac Pro about to be sent to dump.
- Took Mac Pro home.
- Fixed Mac Pro.
- Free Mac Pro!!!
When I got home I immediately opened it up to look inside. Everything looked fine, all the parts were there except for a hard drive. I also discovered to my amazement that this was indeed an intel Mac Pro. I popped in a spare hard drive I had lying around and powered it up. Of course I got the flashing question mark, but it did power up fine. So I put in my Leopard DVD (I have the family pack, so far only installed on 3 Macs) and went to boot from it. Got the Apple logo but as soon as the wheel started turning it kernel panicked! My first instinct when this happens is to try swapping RAM around, in case there is a bad module. It had 2x1 GB of RAM installed, so I just took one of the modules out. Same problem. I switched it for the other one, and IT BOOTED! I installed Leopard without a hitch and it booted right up into the installation without issues. About this Mac shows that this has 2 x 3 Ghz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors, which I believe would make it a first generation Mac Pro. It has an ATI Radeon X1900 XT with 512 MB memory.
I have been playing around with this thing now for a couple days and I simply can not believe how lucky I am. It was like winning the lottery. I'm still not sure exactly what I am going to do with it, but this is just so amazing I can't stop looking at it!
For those who don't want to read my long post:
- Found Mac Pro about to be sent to dump.
- Took Mac Pro home.
- Fixed Mac Pro.
- Free Mac Pro!!!