Happy Mac

Success! Gigabyte of RAM in Fox, one of the mighty engines that drive The Build Doctor. It's an old G4 PPC based Mac. Most of the articles that I have written for the blog have crossed this little Mac's desktop. Fox only had half a gigabyte of RAM. That wasn't really enough to load the operating system and the applications. Camino (my main browser) itself was taking up hundreds of megabytes of RAM on it's own.

The one thing that stopped me from upgrading earlier was that damn case. You don't unscrew it, you prise the thing open with a palette knife. My palette knife is rusted to bits and wasn't going anywhere near Fox. After reading up on it, I ordered a plastic spatula from Amazon in the hope that I could use it to prise the lid open. No deal. It turned out that I had a plentiful supply of what I needed - table knives. Push the knife into the crack between the lid and the case, gently slide along to release the first clips, and then lever out. Repeat on three sides:


Once you have the lid loosened you can proceed with the upgrade. This guide was very helpful ( courtesy of @nasrat). Here's the machine with old ram out and new ram in:


The case doesn't seem to be scratched. Was it worth it? I think so. The UI is snappier and I can run iTunes, iPhoto and a browser. Which used to take some patience.

Thanks to @nasrat and @indietim who sent encouraging tweets.