My PowerMac G4 seems to have died. I’m annoyed, but I guess I shouldn’t complain too much as it has served me well since 1999.

I pulled it out from under the desk on Friday to reconfigure everything, then when I put it back and hooked everything up today¹ it wouldn’t come on².

The good news is that I was well prepared for something like this to happen. I need a desktop machine to hook everything up to – luckily, I have my Quad all set up so I don’t need to run out and buy a Mac mini or something. My backup disks are in external enclosures, so I just plugged them in to the Quad. My rsync backup script was saved in Tasks, so setting up the Quad to wake up every morning and run the script on a CRON job took only a few minutes.

I may try to resurrect the G4 again at some point, but for now I’ve got too much else on my plate. If I can’t bring it back, I’ll probably pick up a Mac mini at some point³ to run this stuff.

1. After doing a little work to make it all fit. [back]
2. I tried changing the power cord, using a different power outlet, removing all peripherals, resetting the PMU, etc. [back]
3. Perhaps one of the G4 models that should be discounted when the Intel models are released? [back]