My brother now has his new G4/400 computer with 128 MB
RAM and a 20 GB hard
drive. Apparently that's a standard configuration because that's what
the
Apple label says on the box. We got him a 17" monitor to go with it.
Very
crisp display, as are most Apple monitors (except for the cheap
Performa
monitors they had a few years back).
The computer is fast. Quite faster than my PowerBook. I
now think that
the
reason I can stand my PowerBook is that I also occassionally have to
use my
old PowerMac 6100, and that sucker is slow as hell. It takes a few
seconds
to get control back after I switch applications. But the G4 is a good
computer.
Applications start up much quicker, the screen is nice and big, much
better
than the 13" monitor they had before.
Anyway, the G4 came with two CDs (well, three really,
but one is
FaxSTF).
There is a CD to install the system software, it has a special version
of
Mac OS 9. Then there is a CD to restore the hard drive to the factory
shipped
state.
So I'm asleep and Chris sets up the computer. And he has
trouble
playing the
DVD movie I brought. So he gets online and downloads some updates. But
that
doesn't work. Then I tell him he should have partitioned his hard drive
because
we're going to reinstall the system software cleanly and with one
partition
that means we wipe out his current data (which wasn't much since we
still had
the old hard drive).
So we partition the hard drive in four pieces. Install
OS 9 in one
partition.
Download the OS 9 update again and let software update do its magic.
After a
couple of hours everything has been updated and the DVD player works
fine.
Then we hook up the old hard drive to my PowerBook, network the
PowerBook and
the G4, and transfer all the old data to another partition on the G4.
That
takes 3 hours.
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Now everything is setup. Christopher is happy with his
new computer. I take
any software that uses floppy disks as Chris doesn't want any legacy
stuff.
We still need a USB cable to hook up the printer, and a book on Mac OS
9 since
Chris has never been up to speed on the OS features. (There's a nice
Mac OS 9
book from O'Reilly, about the only publisher where I can say that all
their
books are excellent).
So I bought him the book and he's now reading it. Next
week it's time
to set
up CodeWarrior so he can start to learn Java. I wasn't too sure if he
should
study C or Java, and I decided on Java because it's more cross-platform
and
it's probably better to learn an Object Oriented Language before a
Procedural
Language. I have CodeWarrior Discover Programming 5 and an old copy of
Learn
Java on the Macintosh, by Dave Marks.
My plan is to install CodeWarrior, show him how to
compile and run Java
programs (CodeWarrior does almost all of the work, nice since running a
Java
program on the Mac is not as simple as on Windows). Then he can start
learning
Java and hopefully finish in a month or two. After that I'll give him
some
projects to do. I'm thinking of using the JavaWorld Code Master
challenges,
which are quite involved even for me so I may have to help him.
Unfortunately, this will only teach him how to program.
Teaching him
how to
design a program, that takes a few years and I'll leave it to UC Davis
to teach
him. He's already bought three new games. So much for that college
money he
was saving.
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