Thanks to my generous brother-in-law, I borrowed an older Mac G3 Desktop to play with to see if I could cure some of my Windows blues. Here’s a brief summary of the day’s events:

7:00 am: Setup Belkin video adapter to PC monitor as well as installed more RAM. While the monitor adapter worked, the additional RAM (256MB - 2 128MB DIMM’s) is only showing 128MB. Will install OS 9.2.2 before getting too concerned.

7:20: Figured out how to “boot off CD” (boot holding the “C” key) to install OS 9.2 after searching Apple web site. After a bit, notice a little bomb icon. That’s not good, however, the progress bar is still moving.

7:45: Just got a dialog box: no text, an exclamation point, and an ok button (I guess Apple went to the same UI design school as Windows). After clicking ok, OS 9 comes up, slow as can be, but necessary for clean install. Launch Mac OS Installer.

7:56: Running a clean install, system reports about an hour to complete. Me? Im off to Starbucks for a mocha.

9:15: Progress bar is moving, yet, still says 1 hour remaining. About 1/3 done. Perhaps ill need to replace both the CD drive and hard drive w/ something faster.

9:27: Oops. Now it decided that it has 2 hrs remaining.

10:00: No progress. Aborted install. Removed the CD drive, replaced it with a DVD drive from my PC. After rebooting off CD, LOTS faster. Quickly reformatted the HD, and reran the Setup. Geez. 14 minutes estimated. That’ll teach me to use an old CD drive.

10:40: Now that’s better. OS 9.2.2 installed. Going to see if I can figure out the RAM issue before installing OSX. Still getting blank dialog box. Bizarre. Looks like the 128MB PC simms are only recognizing 64MB per SIMM.. looks like we’ll need to replace those.

11:00: Decided to bit the bullet and install OSX w/ only 128MB RAM. Installation reports that OSX needs about 2 hours to complete.

11:17: Figured out RAM issue. Chips I have are 8 chip per DIMM, needs 16. Going to swap w/ another machines RAM when install complete. BTW, install now up to needing 2 hours, 52 minutes.

11:22: Whoa! Down to 1 hour, 10 minutes.

12:00: Install completed. After initial reboot, what’s this? Needs disk 2 now. Boooo.

12:35: Finally finished installing “additional software”, and presented with Aqua in all it’s beauty. First thing: need to swap RAM. However, it looks like it wants to first install a security software update.

12:50: Ok, updates complete. Restarting. YES! Now at 320MB ram. Performing various installs: MSN Messenger, Remote Desktop, etc.

2:00: Hm. Now what. Everything seems to be working ok, but, not quite sure what to do now. Guess ill need to think about that for a bit. Should I move towards replacing my .NET server with the Mac box?

So, it’s now 2:10. Think im done w/ the Mac for now until I can figure out something interesting to do. Perhaps im just too far gone into the Windows world. I dunno, at least this will be an good experiment for UI design. More soon.