Scored 2 PowerBooks and a G4 Cube via random email!

Thats awesome, especially the G4 Cube, I have been wanting one for years. Also the powerbook 100 and 170, nice. Overall great score!

Wow! G4 Cube with CPU upgrade for $60? That's nuts.

Nice! I glad to see a Cube going to a good home. I hate the sight of seeing one being thrown away. Any idea if it was originally a 500MHz?

Very, very, very nice. The G4 Cube alone is worth much more than that. :O Is the monitor a Studio Display?

Fortuna has truly smiled upon you!

I hope the void under the Cube base has been packed in, as mishandling in transit can result in the core being ripped/broken from the upper section. Not a pretty site.

Congratz!!! Even without the cpu upgrade thats a great deal IMHO. Good to see people passing there gear on. Seems to be happening quite a bit lately.

Excellent score!

I'm not sure if I'm more jealous of the PB 100 or the SuperCube (that's what I nominate as a name for your upgraded Cube...or Gigacube). The PB 170 is a nice one too...a PB 180 was my first 100 series PB, and either my second or third PB. 5300cs was my first PB (bought 1997 or early 1998 as an Apple Refurb), and I can't remember if the 180 or the 230 and Dock came next once I started getting into older Macs.

Extra SCSI cables are always good to have around too. I know I have many more SCSI devices than I do cables and terminators!

Do we get to see some pics?

Don't know if it was originally a 450 or 500 MHz.

It's a 17" Studio Display.

It's on schedule for delivery tomorrow. I can't wait!

Congrats, gotta love it. :b&w:

CRT or LCD StudioDisplay? Both are very cool.

LCD, I think? I guess I'll find out tomorrow. I assumed it was LCD.

I've got both so, of course, I prefer the CRT, but I'm old school for some reason or other.

It's such a sweet deal, I really think you should name it SugarCube.

To be honest, I love the 17" ASD CRT...if anything i think it looks much cooler than the LCD. But they're huge and heavy, and difficult to ship, and they take up a ton of space.

These days I live in a place in Sydney thats about the size of a shoebox, therefore the few displays I have are LCDs. While LCDs are technically better, I miss the "warmth" that the image from a CRT has. I always love it when I have to power up an analog DVR at work, since it means digging out one of the old CRTs. I guess its kinda like the old guys who prefer tube amps over solid state amps, for that very reason.

Since when did LCDs become "technically superior?" :?:

I got the Cube in. Still waiting on the PowerBooks.

It turns out the Studio Display is a 15" monitor, not 17". I guess that's OK. I already have a 17" on my other Cube. I'd rather have a 17" and a 15". That way I have "one of each" instead of "1 extra"!

This Cube is a screamer! The proc has been upgraded to 1GHz. It has a 32MB Nvidia 2 card as well as a SuperDrive, AirPort, 400G HDD, and 1G of RAM. It's running 10.5.8.

Everything in it is better than the one I paid twice the price for. The one catch was that one of the USB ports was mangled. I swapped the logicboards and brought the RAM up to 1.5GBs. Now it's in good shape and it's pretty fast.

One thing that's bothering me is that it turns on my itself. Has anyone seen that? I thought maybe the power button on the display was faulty, so I disabled it in Sys Prefs. It still turns on by itself. If I shut it down, anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes later, it just "bongs" and boots up on its own. Is this the power button, or the power management board?

I headed over to the cubeowner forums and found that in many cases, it's the gasket around the power switch that is the culprit. Many times, it can be fixed by simply taping a small piece of antistatic bag over it. Sometimes any old piece of paper does the trick. It's funny, because when I took the Cube apart, there was a small piece of antistatic bag taped over the switch. I thought the previous owner put it there to dim the LED a bit. I guess I'll have to put it back when I get home and hope that fixes it.

As I suspected, it's the gasket. I taped a small piece of antistatic bag over the power switch proximity sensor and it works like a charm. When I shut the Cube off, it stays off.

Can you post pictures? I'm glad the static bag trick worked!

I'm in the middle of writing up an extensive blog post on my site. I'll post a link to it when it finished uploading, but here's a pic:



PowerLogix 1GHz G4

1.5GB RAM

Nvidia GeForce 2MX 32MB

400G Seagate

SuperDrive

Airport

OS X 10.5.8

17" Studio Display

Here's a link to the writeup on my blog for my first Cube with a 17" monitor.

The new Cube with 15" monitor.

And the rebuild combining the best of both Cubes.

Since when did LCDs become "technically superior?"

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More than a decade -- At work, I have a trio of 19-inch Dell UltraSharps from about 2003 or so that completely beat the pants off of any CRT I've owned -- even some quite nice Trinitrons. (I've had a Dell P992 or 993, and an SGI GDM17E11, which were each fairly old when I got them, they had beautiful picture, but I'd rarely choose to use one of those displays instead of an LCD display, even a relatively modern midrange one, like the UltraSharp 1908wfp I have at home now. -- Even if you told me you'd changed the nature of the universe and that CRTs could hold calibrations for a long time and would never become uncalibrateable, there would still be a whole lot of reasons why I wouldn't go back.)

here's a pic

Click to expand...

Cute. It's always a little bit funny how much space complete set-ups take. For a machine as much smaller than a PowerMac G4 as it is, it looks like it actually takes more desk space. (at least if you want sound, I suppose.)

You're not kidding. I had to move my 128K and 512K to make it fit. Don't know what I'll do once I splurge for a 20" monitor. I guess it'll fit. I'd love a 23", but that seems overkill for a machine that's probably not going to see enough action to justify such a large display. I'd like the 20" just for the bragging rites.

Since when did LCDs become "technically superior?"

Click to expand...

More than a decade

Click to expand...

I imagine that's debatable. (although off-topic for this thread?) Granted once you get above a certain age time seems to have this habit of telescoping somewhat, but I recall at least so far as color saturation goes there was still a case for CRTs up to... maybe half a decade ago, although the war was already lost by then. (I'd say that around the time LED backlights came out it was truly clinched.) Until recently I actually had a 2003 vintage NEC Multisync *mumblesomethingsomethingnumber* flat panel (a *very fancy* for the time 20" inch 1600x1200 DVI interface unit) sitting on my desk for occasional use with my laptop, and when a monitor of that age is sitting next to a recent vintage one it's clear that LCD technology has advanced a lot in the intervening time. Undoubtedly its backlight had dimmed somewhat with age, but even factoring that in it's clear that the color range and contrast ratios of those units were far inferior to what we're used to today, and the viewing angles are much more limited. (Get more than about 40 degrees off from dead on and the display pretty much becomes a silvery rectangle... which may have its good points, mind you.)

Of course, in 2003 I didn't give a darn and loved LCDs anyway. I *hate* convergence problems on CRTs, HATE THEM, and every large CRT I've used has had them. On an LCD a pixel is a pixel, no bloody fringing. I'll take pastel toned colors in exchange for no fringes, no problem.

Some kind of perspex thing that can attach the speakers to the monitor would be nice - free up some desk space.

There's no comparison between my 27" and 30" Cinema Displays. They're only 3 years apart, but in that time the price had dropped from $1699 for the 30" to $999 for the 27". It's not just $700 cheaper but the LCD is orders-of-magnitude better than the 30".

Are you keeping both?

I imagine that's debatable. (although off-topic for this thread?)

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Fair enough -- and we all know how I am, respectively. [] ]'>

Anyway, I imagine the displays I have were quite expensive in their day, and they're noticeably worse than a more modern LCD. I'm also sure that if i were display shopping in 2003 (I was not), and wanted to save money or get something very high end for design work, the default choice would still have been to get a CRT. As recently as 2008 though? That's a really hard sell, unless Sony was still shipping that 24-inch wide FD-Trin which could go to some ridiculous resolution like 3600x1440 or whatever it was. Even then, 2008 had a lot of reasonably affordable displays at quite high quality. One of my main displays (A Dell UltraSharp 1908WFP) is from that time and despite being a TN panel, there are about a hundred reasons why I'd choose it over even the above-mentioned ridiculously high-resolution FD-Trin display. (Not the least of which is that somebody has to pick these things up and move them at some point or another.)

If we go back to 2006, I knew people still buying new CRTs, although I suspect it was cost-motivated more than anything else, and the CRT in question was just really really bad. (I think it was like $100 or so, new.) (And as far back as then, I probably would either have kept using my midrange CRTs or bought a new one, if I'd bought some kind of modular desktop computer -- I had awesome plans to use a Mac Pro with a 17-inch display that I had which couldn't quite focus correctly above 1024x768 resolution, for no sane reason at all other than that a Mac Pro in and of itself was going to stretch my particular budget so incredibly far that even $100 on a new CRT was out of the question.) (But that last bit is neither here nor there because I went to college with a pismo and liked it until I picked a Dell GX110 desktop out of a surplus pile, combined it with another, and used that.)

As recently as 2008 though? That's a really hard sell...

Click to expand...

Again, "half a decade" is a ball park figure. I remember high-end monitors like the Sony Artisan series and the Lacie Electron Blues still being "out there" as late as... 2004, 2005?, and they stuck around on the desks of of the serious Photoshoppers for quite a while after that but yes, I'll grant that by 2008 they were essentially dead as a marketable product. HOWEVER, you did specifically say "OVER a decade", and... I think there may also be some confabulation going on between "popularity" and "technically superiority". Outside of the computer field the HDTV market was seriously still in technological flux in 2003 and at the time the opinion that LCD-based solutions, both direct view and projection, as a group offered the worst picture quality amongst the various alternatives was still very much alive.

Anyway, just being nitpicky.

@TheMacGuy

Yes, keeping both. Never know when I'll get my hands on another one. So it's always good to keep a back up. If I want to keep this machine for another 10 years, a spare logicboard, power supply, etc might come in handy.

Good. I hate to see a Cube thrown in the trash or given to an owner who doesn't collect Macs. No telling what could happen, I mean look at the sad life mine had until I found it.

Hi,

That's something I'd be inclined to do: have one in perfect condition, and another one (or more ) kinda-sorta OK machine(s) for spare parts.

I hope it gives you many years of trouble free service!

c

p.s. I must go find myself one at some point (perhaps when people decide they aren't worth $300 or more without accessories ).