The Fastest Mac in the World, Part II

[Note: Confused? You may need to go back and read Part I. Don’t worry, it’s kinda fun.]

My poor client… you have to picture this: she has a brand new MacBook, but she’s been designing and printing all the labels for her line of herbal products on an ancient Performa using Clarisworks. Urk! Obviously this is okay, even if it has me rolling my eyes, so long as the old Mac works. She also just hired a new assistant, and she wants to keep the assistant out of her office space, and she doesn’t want to let the assistant use the MacBook. This means she’d like the assistant to take over label-making duty on the (ugh) Performa. And of course, when we last looked in on this scene, I couldn’t even get the Performa to boot.

Aarghh.

Well, my first brilliant idea was to just sell her my old PowerMac 8600 and toss the Performa. What a perfect solution! But first I had to go extract the 8600 and one of three monitors sitting in the storage unit, gather up all my old SCSI gear and OS 9 software, set the whole mess up on the dining room table, and erase all my personal data. Whew. (Pant, pant…)

Okay, I did that. Boy, do I hate that storage unit, but I did that. It’s already been 13 below zero here, so I had to let the hardware warm up first. (“Gee, what a nice computer.”) And guess what? When I finally powered up, it worked perfectly. Everything worked, and worked so well…

The 8600 had a lot of RAM, 648 MB maybe, and a 450 MHz G3 upgrade. That much RAM makes OS 9 shoot for the stars, too. It was unspeakably fast. Yes, noticeably snappier in the Finder than the 1.83 GHz MacBook with two gigs of RAM that I’m typing this on now. As far as I was concerned, it was The Fastest Mac in the World, hands down. What’s more, it had every conceivable piece of software on it. Tons of stuff, and everything ran like it was new. When I started trashing files and apps, I felt really sad, and so I stopped. In fact, the only thing I got rid of was Claris Emailer. So?

Yup. You guessed it. No way was I going to let this thing go. Some day I’d have room for it on my work table, and then I could … um … well, I could do stuff on it. You know, things like … uh… well, hell, it even had 3-D apps on it, and I could still use the old Wacom drawing tablet with it. And, and… I LIKED it. And it was so ridiculously fast. I mean, I could sell tickets or something. (“See? See?? Want to close a window? WHAM! Hit the pull down menu? WHAM!”)

I was on a roll, launching apps and reliving old glories. (WHAM!) Oh, what fun. Except… oh no… except that now I would have to get that poor old Performa up and running after all, or at least pull the documents off the hard drive, and then I’d have to present the client with a sensible plan. I wanted to tell her “Mac mini,” but so far, that was fantasy. Reality was a stone-cold Performa, and the lady had labels to print!

All right, now you know the secret of the Fastest Mac in the World. But the black comedy is just beginning. How did one rebuild a desktop, for example? I’d forgotten everything. I wanted to forget everything, but I had a duty to remember.

As I write this, the 8600 is neither back in the storage unit nor in my client’s office. No, it’s still sitting in my truck outside. What does this mean? Will the Fastest Mac in the World end up as a lowly label-producing unit after all? Will the Performa end up in an arroyo overnight? Will I have the nerve to tell my client she has to spend another thousand bucks?

We shall see.