For this labor day weekend the weather was nice and I took a nice break from my programming duties, but didn't really get away from computers. Just my computer. This weekend I did two computer upgrades for family members.
The first was an upgrade of my Mother's iMac to run Mac OS 10.2. It was very simple and went without a a hitch. The only trouble I ran into was when I burned a CD-R containing a couple of files I wanted to transfer over to the iMac. Oddly enough, the CD I created on the PowerMac with it's SuperDrive simply didn't show up on the iMac. The disk worked fine on the PowerMac as well as my TiBook. Don't really know why.
 Luckily, I have a handy external USB/Firewire drive. I put the files onto that drive and plugged it into the iMac USB port (it's an older iMac w/o a Firewire port). That transfered the files easily.
The second upgrade took a bit longer.
My sister, Paige, and her husband, Stu, have a PC. They take a lot of ribbing over this, since almost everyone else in the family uses a Macintosh. We were over at their house for dinner Saturday for their son's birthday and they came in for an extra helping of abuse because their PC was so virus ridden that it barely could function at all.
A few rounds of "buy a Mac" comments weren't getting us anywhere. Well, I have an old Pentium III/600 from my Granitar days. I used it as my main Linux server when I had the T1 coming to the house, but now with the co-lo server having taken over that role, the Linux box has been collecting dust down in the basement computer bone yard.
Now the old Pentium III/600 box isn't exactly state of the art, but it's a lot faster than their old PC (a Pentium II/166). So I offered it up to them. With a couple of additions like a new CD-RW drive and a new LCD display it would server them well for a while.
So Stu and I trotted off to Best Buy to pick up the items we needed (the LCD, CD-RW, a USB hub, and a shiny new firewall/switch). Then we spent a while installing a fresh copy of Windows-2000 (thanks to a couple of licenses I had from another previous job). We setup separate accounts for Paige, Stu, and the kids so no one would step on the toes of the others (unlike when they ran Window-98) and the thing went pretty well. It's not nearly as slick as Mac OS X, but will do for now.
We moved it all to their house and, while coping with a shortage of electrical outlets, got it all setup and running. We had to download and install a whole boatload of service packs and security updates - this was Windows. But all was finally getting usable after almost an entire day of marathon upgrading.
Hopefully, they can keep the viruses at bay for a while. Running Windows 2000 instead of Windows 98 should help somewhat with that, but I'm I'm still hoping their next computer will be a Macintosh.
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