Ed <gwbush@whitehouse.com> wrote:

> While sitting with my son at the hospital (he's been diagnosed with Perthes
> disease) 

Poor lad--how old is he? (I had never heard of Perthes disease before,
so I've been reading up on it).

> I got tired of the inactivity of watching him play Stuffy 2 on his
> game boy and took a walk. Right next to the hospital is a computer store
> that is going out of business. I walk in and there's almost nothing on the
> shelves. What they do have is an old demo version of a power mac 8500/120
> selling for 1,500 yen. A 17 inch monitor was going for 1,000 yen so I bought
> the computer and monitor and told my daughter that it's her computer.

Sounds like a good bargain. Now that all Mac users are being nagged into
going for G5, you might be able to find a G3 or G4 upgrade card for the
8500 going cheap (that kept my 7100 going for some time). How much
memory is installed?
> 
> She was ecstatic about having her own computer until we powered the thing
> up. I'm a windows dude. I don't know jack about apple computers. She want's
> to access the internet, but I can't figure this thing out for the life of
> me.

Presumably you do have a modem connected to it? Or it has an internal
one? Did it come with system disks?
> 
> All I know is that it has version 8 something of a mac OS.

Click on the Desktop to make sure you are in the Finder, then pull down
the Apple menu at the top-left of the screen and select the first item
(probably "kono kompyu-ta ni tsuite" if it's a Japanese system). That
will tell you what system it is. It might be 8.6 (the last of the System
8 upgrades), if not you can download an updater from
<http://tinyurl.com/w5dy> or
<http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Update
s/Japanese/Macintosh/System/>.

I'd suggest a clean install (if you do have the CD), because there's no
way of knowing what's been done to it while it was a demo model.

I wonder if the 8500 can upgrade gracefully to OS9, since it's possible
we have a spare OS9 disk.

The Internet setup stuff is at TCP/IP under that same menu, but it's so
long since I've used the dial-up modem I'm afraid I can't talk you
through that.

> 
> Help, help, help!!!
> 
> --
> you know I should of suspected he was gay.  his pecker tasted like shit.

Hmmmmm.... unfortunate .sig under the circs.
________________________________________________________________________
                   Louise Bremner (log at gol dot com)
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