Friday, February 21, 2020

$20 Mac Pro saved from the Grave Yard BUT WHY???

Why would any one want to get a Mac Pro Xeon 1,1 in 2020???

I did it!!

Check the Upgrade here


Check out our YouTube Channel for future Videos of these adventures

Also Check This out!! Upgrading the  Mac Pro 1,1 to a 2,1 for Dual Quad Xeon support

 A bit over a week ago I was stumbling through OfferUp looking for storage related hardware.  Just on a whim I came across a listing that I almost bypassed out of shear disbelief. I have been wanting to pick up a Mac Pro 4,1 or 5,1 for some time now but the prices on these computers even though they are 10 years or more old is outrageous local listings of over $500 to $1200 USD for systems of this age.

The title just stated Computer desktop apple.  No other context just saying need it gone with a price tag of $10 bucks USD.

Here are some of the pictures of it.


Now from the pictures I knew that this was at least an Intel model not a Power Mac G5 model (Had one of those a few years ago) but I was unsure if I were to get lucky and come up with a 4,1 or 5,1 (hind sight those models don't have fire-wire 400 connections).
Messaged the seller, they got back to me in an hour or so.  I want to buy it.  Sight unseen not even asking if it works.  He said he had another buyer that was interested but would meet me right now for $20.  "Heck ya be there in 15 min"

Twenty buck later back in my office opened it up to find it had all of its internals 2 GB's of ram in the memory boards. All of the Hard Drive trays intact with a 250GB hard drive and a Radeon x1900 GPU.  Good enough to get at least to get a semblance of an OS on it.

Plugged it in crossed my fingers as I pressed the power button.  And was greeted with the Apple classic Chime.  YAY!!! Boots directly in to Lion recovery.  Not bad but when I try to install it wants to verify that it eligible for Lion and down load it.  After plugging in a network cable and waiting for over an hour for something to happen.  I said screw it and went to the internet low and be hold an hour later I had a fully working Mac Pro 1,1 running 10.7 Lion.

2 Xeon Dual-Core processors running at a blistering speed of 2.66 GHz and now a total of 8 GB of DDR 2 ECC  memory scavenged from an old Dell Server.

Running Lion in 2020 is a futile attempt to call something usable.  Safari is sourly out of date, Chrome will not run, and even though I have old versions of FireFox available to install web browsing and any type of media will just not be pleasurable to run.  Even at the $20 price tag still would be mostly a hot running paper weight.  Possibly a file server and that is about it.

Bit more research and yes I can get El Capitan running on it wich is still useable in 2020 and I can upgrade the ram, processors, Hard drives (too SSD) and have at least a cheap NAS and usable system. 

Stay tuned as I will try and cover all of the upgrades as they get done.

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