I bought my girlfriend an Apple G4 Dual Digital Audio 533 Powermac. Right now she has an aging Powermac G4 400mhz, which is getting very sluggish. I want to give it to her as a surprise, so I'm wondering if it's possible to simply take the hard drive in her G4 400mhz and put it into the G4 Dual.

I bought the G4 Dual on Ebay, and I'm still waiting for it to arrive. I don't have a Mac here that I can test it with, so I'm wondering if anyone would be able to tell me. I have Tiger install CDs if I just have to transfer all the files, but I'm wondering if there's definitely a way to make it a very simple switch.

If it's possible to just swap drives, would someone be able to recommend a drive cloning tool that I can use? If I can just put the drive in and push the power button, I'm wondering if I can also clone the drive onto a larger disk (I think she has 40gb now, I would just clone it onto something bigger, 160gb or whatever I can get).

Thanks in advance,
-bonestonne

Yes it is. They use the exact same hard drive hookups at the exact same speed. Just swap them out and you should be all right.

Well, it wasn't so much the devices they used, I was asking because I was unsure if the OS would recognize the second processor as well as updated hardware. Her biggest problem is whether or not her iTunes will change (at least, that's what I'm worried about), so if I can swap her drives like that, she'll never know it's a new computer until she can miraculously do more with it.

Does anyone know about disk cloning then? I'd like to clone her drive onto a larger one if need be, I'm wondering what software I should use for that. I think her dad has carbon clone, or something like that, so I'll probably do it during the day when she's at school, but I'm wondering what's good for it.

The OS install is pretty generic and it should recognize the dual proc system immediately.

alright, thanks for the info (still getting used to owning a real mac).

I'll team up with her dad to make the switch while she's at school, because i need to work on his G5 Dual anyway (he thinks the fans are starting to go, i peeked inside, and saw a ton of things that could be the cause).

Hey all, I didn't want to start a new topic, I was wondering if anyone could tell me what the best QE/CI supported AGP card was that I could get for this G4.

It has the ATI Rage 128 with 16mb of VRAM, which is absolute crap (it'll play movies and such, but flash, embetted ads, and youtube/google videos are crap. It's too close to stop motion animation for me, and that bothers me when I just want to watch a video, so since this isn't even for me, I'd like to see it working better than what it's replacing.

I have some time, as I'm waiting on a 17" LCD that I'm giving with this, but I'd like QE and CI support, not just one or the other. I don't want to spend more than $40 on this, but I'm sure I'll figure something out eventually. If you have one, I'd be glad to buy it from you, but at the least, I'd like to know a model.