I’ve been working on our old eMac, a Mac that we bought in 2003 when Tammy was a student at Missouri State. It was our primary computer until last year when I replaced it with an iMac with an LCD screen, picked up used from the guys at daZZee where I worked. Yesterday, I installed Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) on the hard drive and it’s amazing how usable it is.

The eMac has only 768MB of RAM but an upgrade to 2GB would be easy. It uses a standard 3.5″ ATA hard drive and those are getting a bit scarce, but it’s 80GB and has plenty of usable space. I’ll replace temporary CD-ROM with a DVD burner later this week after a bit of research.

Overall, the machine has plenty of snap. It’s perfect for the day-to-day email, web surfing and iLife apps. Since it’s older, some newer software won’t run on the G4 chip, but that’s not much of an issue. It’s tempting to keep it and use it until it breaks down.

I took the day off from work on Friday, calling it a mental health holiday. I needed to spend the day working on a couple of older computers we had around the house, trying to get them prepped for sale. I had a mostly successful day taking one apart and replacing bits and pieces. The DVD drive in our aging but usable eMac has gone bad so replacing it was the first step. I had was an extra CD-ROM from an old PC but after it was installed, I realized it won’t boot from it. Looks like I’ll need to get a new drive after all.