How to Fix Your MacOf course Macs are perfect, immune to viruses and they never, ever crash. Still, sometimes the universe conspires against these Machines and, against all odds, a Mac goes down. Not long ago, our perpetually Happy Mac started acting funny. |
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Our patient was a Mac G3 (400Mhz) with 64MB of RAM. The machine (if you'll allow me to call one of god's creations a "machine") began developing some quirks. Sure, when powered up, it made it to the "Happy Mac" stage, but after that, the display would kick off and sometimes the whole blueberry baby would go down. Eventually, she became totally unstable and unusable. |
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After extensive analysis, Herr Professor determined that our patient was dead, or very nearly so. The symptoms were fairly clear: at a minimum, the power supply was dead, but this aging 400 Mhz machine had seen better days. In any case, it was unusable and the price of fixing proprietary components was prohibitive. Radical surgery was required. Still, the Mac is a delicate platform (despite its robustness) that is not always open to hardware changes. The Good Doktor knew she could be saved and Igor was sent to the morgue to find the appropriate replacement parts. "Abby Normal, Master. " he declared about the new motherboard and processor he returned with: $10 after rebates from TigerDirect. |
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Screw drivers, wire cutters, knives and butane torches were just the first tools Herr Professor reached for. After the Mac was gutted of its bulky CRT and faulty (heresy!) power supply, the aged creature's brains were removed. The motherboard and an 800 Mhz VIA processor went in first, at least twice as fast as the Mac's original brain. A bolt or two and a little glue was all that was needed. $30 worth of RAM (256 MB) and an old hard drive completed the basic transplant. A second video card was added to give the beast dual-monitor capabilities. |
The CRT was easily replaced by a 15-inch LCD. No one could argue that this wasn't an improvement. Powering this unholy combination became a serious concern, but an ancient 200-watt power supply was found, dug up from the Computer Graveyard. The power cord was easily spilt between the LCD and the ATX power supply to maintain the single-power-cord characteristic of the Mac. An old power button was added and, after plugging in... "It's alive! It's alive!" FrankenMac was born. |
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No, FrankenMac was not a beautiful child, with holes drilled in his head and zip ties strapping hard disks and power supplies to the sides and top of the case, but he was lighter and faster than ever before. And he even got an OS X Panther facelift. Despite being sewn together from the remains of the recently deceased, despite the Unholy Union of an iMac and WinXP, FrankenMac was, and to this very day is, alive. |
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Other ways to fix your Mac:
Fix Your Windows PC:
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