Yikes!

Where great old Macs live again!

Posted by James on March 9, 2008 at 11:55am

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I received a Power Macintosh G4 "Yikes" in the mail yesterday. It was $40 + shipping so I figured why not? I have a Sawtooth and thought that was good enough to represent the first generation of G4 Macs, but Yikes is a little bit of a different animal with the PCI bus and the low-end 350 MHz processor. It will require a little cleaning and there are some hairline cracks in the case, so it is no where near perfect.

Upon startup, I got no video and no chime so I got to work. First I tried a new PRAM battery, but that didn't help. Then i noticed the memory chips weren't all aligned. One was at an angle. Yikes! That's when I noticed the socket had been bent over a bit. I gently straightened it out to be parallel to the logic board and made sure the RAM was seated properly. Also, one of the other chips wasn't firmly in the slot either. Miraculously, I was able to boot after this fix.

I'll be doing a clean install of OS 9 and 10.4 and then a thorough cleaning of the case in attempt to minimize the scratches.

Tags: g4, macintosh, pci, power, yikes

Comment by Wholly Mindless on March 9, 2008 at 6:10pm: Once again, Lazarus LIVES!

Comment by macuser77 on March 22, 2008 at 11:24am: Good Luck! I bought my first retromac, a G4 sawtooth (actually, I was afraid it was going to be a YIKES! based on the image from the Mac reseller). They're still great machines!

Comment by macuser77 on May 16, 2008 at 5:56am: Is Lazarus still holding up ok?

Comment by Wholly Mindless on May 16, 2008 at 9:46am: And why don't we get to see pictures of the new addition. That makes ... how many macs now?

Comment by James on May 16, 2008 at 11:38am: I still need to get around to doing a full inventory. Alas, the Yikes isn't getting any regular use after I fixed it and did a clean install.

Comment by Wholly Mindless on May 16, 2008 at 11:48am: I have visions of you wandering around the house with your Newton tallying up the machines and looking under the kitchen cabinet and counting a Mac 512 and a few days later your spouse opening the medicine cabinet to find a pizza box mac and screaming....

Comment by macuser77 on May 17, 2008 at 12:04am: I'd like to see pics.... maybe we can all build a G4 processor, motherboard showcase... I've got the Sawtooth and a dual 533 mhz taken care of.