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.

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.