Low End Mac Reader Specials

TypeStyler For Mac OS X is Now Shipping! Download The Free Fully Functional 60 Day Tryout at www.typestyler.com

Don't install Parallels to play poker online! Poker Mac will show you how to download and install a native Mac poker application such as Full Tilt Poker Mac.

Laptop Hardware Provided by TechRestore - Overnight Mac & iPod Repairs.

Compare products like desktop computers, apple laptops, apple macs, and LCD Monitors side by side! All the information and reviews to make the best purchasing decision for new mobile phones, sat nav systems, or MP3 players. The Ciao online shopping community makes searching products easy for you.

Power Mac 5200 and the Single Man

Jason Allen - 2001.10.22

My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your submission to Dan Knight .

A single man can live sparsely for a long time. If the walls of the apartment or rented house are too bare, he can always tape up a Willie Nelson poster or a couple maps. If the furniture doesn't match, that's okay - he wouldn't notice if it did. When he moves, which can be pretty frequently, he's content to dispose of as much stuff as possible, keeping only the necessities and maybe just a few sentimental things, like a favorite old T-shirt, a small gift from someone, or even his often-maligned Power Mac 5200 .

I'm just a single guy living on a meager teacher's salary, so my worldly possessions can probably fit into a small U-Haul trailer. To be sure, as Richard Foster rightly notes in his book Freedom of Simplicity, there's freedom in both the simple life and in the single. When the time is right, my simple and free life will probably lose some of its simplicity and freedom, because I'll encounter, in the words of the 18th-century Quaker John Woolman, "a well-inclined damsel" with whom to wed.

But I digress.

One of the few items that has accompanied me in my journeys over the last few years is my trusty 5200, which, Power Mac 5200 for all its faults and well-deserved criticisms, has proven extremely useful. Even now, though my current workday machine is a Power Mac 7300/200, I am still getting use and enjoyment out of the all-in-one.

The story begins on a snowy Tuesday in February 1996. I was living in Tupelo, Mississippi (ring a bell, you Elvis fans?) in the middle of my second year of teaching 5th grade, and a four-inch snowstorm - yes, that's right - had shut down the schools for four days. With nothing better to do, a friend and I were attempting to play Myst on the LC II that I'd brought home from my classroom. When we could no longer endure the excruciatingly slow graphics, I did what any young, single, still-living-with-his-folks guy would do - I set off for Walmart, where I slapped a whoppin' two grand on the MasterCard for a state-of-the-art, new-in-the-box, never-been-used Performa 5200CD. Thus began a five-year odyssey of a single man and his Mac.

Compared to the LC II that I used in the classroom, the 5200 was a joy to behold. Its speed, internal CD-ROM, 15-inch monitor, and internal modem made my computing life much more enjoyable. For the next 15 months, I used it almost daily for Net-surfing, preparing papers for school, charting the times of my middle school cross country runners, and keeping track of my budget.

July 1997 found me preparing to move to São Paulo, Brazil, where I had signed a contract to teach fifth grade at Pan American Christian Academy. I put the 5200 into its original box, stuffed T-shirts and socks all around it, and just prayed that it would show up at the baggage claim in São Paulo after the nine-hour flight. All ended well. For the next three years I used my Mac daily for email, schoolwork, and Net-surfing. While in Brazil, I upgraded the RAM to 40 MB, replaced the internal 14.4K modem with a 56K modem, and even spent thirteen hours one Saturday downloading and installing the multipart System 7.5.5 - all in a quest to improve the 5200's usability. São Paulo's analog phone systems, which have been repeatedly spliced into by some of the 20-odd million residents of South America's largest city, certainly did not help the dialup Internet experience, but the upgrades did make a difference.

In June 2000, with only boxes of clothes, books, and my computer, I returned to my native Mississippi and promptly bought a used PM 7300 from Mac of All Trades. With ten bucks invested in an ethernet crossover cable and another twenty in an ethernet card, I was able to continue using the 5200, now upgraded to Mac OS 8.1, as a backup hard drive containing six years' worth of teaching lessons and tests.

This school year finds me living and teaching in Dallas, Texas, and the 5200 has refused to say "die." Having never owned my own television and having run across the link to Making a Power Mac 5200 Useful, I began toying with idea of installing a TV Tuner card. After asking around, I found out about Electronic Discount Sales , a two-store chain in the DFW area selling tons of old and new computer equipment. Thirty dollars and a set of $7.99 rabbit ears later, I was sitting on the couch with a remote control in one hand, a glass of sweet tea (nectar of the gods!) in the other, and flipping through sixteen channels. By adjusting the ears, I could get about four channels at a time really clear!

For the next two weeks, I actually got to watch the news rather than just reading it on the Internet, but I was overcome with the desire to watch Cool Hand Luke ("What we've got he-yah is a fail-yah to communicate."), so I headed to the neighborhood K-Mart and picked up a cheap VCR. Over the next three weeks, I got my fill of Casablanca, Murder on the Orient Express, and other classics - but with one small problem. The single man was slowly acquiring some real furniture, so I had to rearrange the sofa and the Mac. Sitting in my new LaZBoy (it matches the sofa!), I couldn't see the monitor as clearly as I wanted.

Well, this week, I showed just how cool a five-year-old Mac - a Performa 5200 at that - could be. A trip back to Electronic Discount Sales left me two dollars lighter and a brand-spanking-new Apple External Video Connector in hand. I plugged the video connector into the 5200 logic board, grabbed the Apple 1710AV from my other Mac, and hooked it up to the ol' dog. Minutes later, The Bridge on the River Kwai was playing loud and clear on a pair of monitors, and I just sat back in the recliner and marveled at it all.

I figure that, after over two thousand days of 5200 ownership, my cost per day is down to about a buck, and I'm still using the 5200 on an almost daily basis. Now, if I could just figure out a convenient way to run a crossover ethernet cable from the bedroom to the living room....

Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.

Recent My Turn articles

Using Low End Macs for Internet Radio, 08.18. When the local public radio station moved classical music to HD radio, it was time to find another way to listen. An old iMac with iTunes solved the problem.
'That's Not a Computer', 07.30. Salvaging a broken PowerBook by turning it into a desktop computer.
Upgrading a Digital Audio G4 to work better in Leopard, 06.02. In its original configuration, the dual 533 MHz Power Mac G4 was slow with Mac OS X 10.5, but add the right upgrades, and it runs Leopard quite nicely.
My 4 favorite PowerBooks, 05.28. The PowerBook 150 has a big screen for a vintage PowerBook, the 165c has color, the 100 is diminutive, and Lombard has USB and a great keyboard.
More in the My Turn index.

Links for the Day

Mac of the Day: 17" MacBook Pro Core Duo, Apr. 2006 - The top-end MacBook Pro includes a 1680 x 1050, 2.16 GHz Core Duo CPU, and supports Apple 30" Cinema Display.
Group of the Day: G4 List is for those using Power Mac G4s or G4 upgrades.
Support Low End Mac

Recent Deals

Best G4 iMac Deals, 11.24. Used 15" 700 MHz CD-RW, $150; 800 MHz Combo, $229; 1 GHz, $289; 17" 1.25 GHz, $200; 20" 1.25 GHz, $509.
Best MacBook Air Deals, 11.24. Used from $899; refurb from $1,099; new 1.6 GHz/120 HD, $1,150 after rebate; 1.8/64 SSD, $1,150 a/r; 1.86/128 SSD, $1,350 a/r; 2.13/128 SSD, $1,694 a/r.
Best PowerBook G3 Deals, 11.24. Used 233 MHz WallStreet, $75; 266 MHz, $160; 400 MHz Lombard, $199; 400 MHz Pismo, $289; 500 MHz, $350.
Best 12" PowerBook G4 Deals, 11.23. Used 867 MHz SuperDrive, $348; 1 GHz Combo, $379; SD, $519; 1.33 GHz, $529; 1.5 GHz Combo, $549; SuperDrive, $609.
Best Mac Pro Deals, 11.23. Used 2.66 GHz 4-core, $1,300; 3.0 4-core. $1,919; refurb 2.66 4-core Nehalem, $2,149; 2.93, $2,549; 2.93 8-core, $4,999; new 2.26 8-core, $2,290.
Best Time Capsule and AirPort Deals, 11.23. Used 802.11g AirPort Extreme, $49; 500 GB Time Capsule, $150; new, $190; 1 TB dual-band, $280; 2 TB, $469; 802.11n AirPort Extreme, $170.
Best eMac Deals, 11.18. Used 1 GHz Combo, $100; SuperDrive, $269; 1.25 GHz Combo, $119; SD, $319; 1.42 GHz Combo, $289; SD, $498.
Best Mac OS X 10.6 and Mac Box Set Deals, 11.18. "Snow Leopard", single user, $25; 5 users, $45; Mac Box Set, single user, $139; 5 users, $180; Server, $414. Shipping included.
Best Xserve Deals, 11.18. Used 1 GHz dual G4, $649; 2.3 dual G5, $795; 3.0 4-core Xeon, $1,899; refurb 2.26 4-core, $2,499; new, $2,888; refurb 8-core, $2,999; new, $3,449; more.
More deals in our archive.

About LEM | Support | Usage | Privacy | Contacts

Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2009 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc., unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Advice presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
Access our RSS news feed at http://lowendmac.com/feed.xml.
Email may be published at our discretion; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. If you prefer your message not be published, mark it "not for publication." Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
PRIVACY: We don't collect personal information unless you explicitly provide it. For more details, see our Terms of Use.
Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iBook, iMac, eMac, iPod, iPhone, PowerBook, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.