Upgrades

The mission-critical G4 has received an improvement---its original 350 MHz processor has been replaced with a 1 GHz aftermarket processor. Noticeably faster, under $300. Installation was simple.

I had to backup a drive and update the boot ROM before installing, which took some time.

Barbaloot approves of the upgrade, after seeing a Harry Potter game spin up. Downside: the original HD, running OS 9.0, was upgraded to 9.2.1 so I could still boot the G4 with it after the CPU upgrade---the CPU is not compatible with OS earlier than 9.2.1. Now that the original HD is on 9.2.1, it won't mount the later (default boot) drive, where OS X sits. OS 9.2.1 asks whether I want to initialize (Apple for format) the later drive. So I might as well have not bothered with the OS upgrade on the older drive.