A buddy of mine is offering to sell me his G4 iMac dirt cheap. Given that the PC I’m using pre-dates the 21st Century (no joke, 750 Mhz processor, Voodoo II video card, etc.) and he’s going to sell it to me for much less than I could buy even a 1 Ghz PC for, I’m inclined to take it (Let’s leave the OS wars out of this discussion, m’kay?), save for one small issue: A TV tuner card.
The room I’d be putting it in (which is where my main box is) doesn’t really have space or furniture for a TV, and presently, my current box has a tuner card in it. I’d like to take the current PC, stick it in the bedroom (where I don’t have a TV and merely an ancient Dell PC that’s just wheezing along), and plunk the iMac down here. Problem is, no TV. He looked for a tuner “card” (really an external box that plugs in via Firewire), and the one he recommends costs as much as a decent TV (Hell, it costs more than the 27" TV I bought new a couple of years ago!), but given that he’s the kind of guy who only wants TVs, etc. that have 8 billion pixel resolution, googol.googol surround sound, etc., etc., etc., I’m guessing that there has to be something cheaper out there. I’ve checked with the external (since the iMac doesn’t have PCI slots AFAIK) card makers that I know of, and all of theirs are USB 2.0, which won’t work, since the iMac has only USB 1.0.
So, is there something I can use, or am I going to have to figure something else out?
Does the G4 iMac have FireWire? I assume you’ve seen the Hauppauge external USB 1.1 TV card. I don’t know if any manufacturers make a FireWire external card, but it’s possible. The problem is simply that the cards are expensive, external ones even more so. The basic card I’m using–analog, no PVR–cost $100 and uses a PCI slot.
I have a Hauppauge, and mine’s certainly pretty decent. Cost me £40 and runs out of a USB port. I think it’s the lowest end of the spectrum in regards to utilities, though, although it does let me connect stuff like DVD players, games console etc. through it.
Yeah the iMac’s got Firewire, but I’ve not seen an adapter you can stuff into a Firewire port to make it a USB 2 port. Which sucks, because the Hauppage stuff’s more expensive than the external USB 2 tuner cards I’ve seen. And there is a Firewire card, it’s what my friend showed me, and if I’m going to be blowing waaaay more on a tuner card than I did for my (larger TV), it’s gotta swallow.
If the iMac is the first iteration — and even many of the Revision B models — of the current design with the computer guts in the screen, examine the capacitors. If it’s that model and the burning, leaking capacitors is news, search for “imac” “capacitors” on the net. The power supply may be no great shakes, either. If it had those problems, they likely have been fixed by now. But it’s worth checking.
You’re talking about a G5 model, this is a G4, and if it was going to meltdown, it would have already done it by now, since my friend’s had it for a couple of years.