A few times a day I head over to craigslist.org and look in the computer, electronics and game & toys section for things people have under priced so I can sell it for more somewhere else. I’ve had really good luck doing this on a number of occasions and even though it is never a huge money maker it feels good to buy low and sell high.

Well last week I came a cross a deal too good to be true but bit anyway, a Power Mac G4 MDD that wouldn’t boot for $60. This particular model sports dual 1Ghz G4 processors, a SuperDrive and an 80GB hard drive. The machine has room for three more hard drives and one other 5.25 slot. With the onboard gigabit ethernet this machine is actually a pretty good performer.

After picking up the machine I got to work figuring out why it wouldn’t boot. The machine would actually turn on and tone but not the usual Mac start up tone. It would tone once and then flash the power button. I looked up the issue on the web and found that the single tone meant no RAM was present. This was odd since all four memory slots were filled with 256MB sticks of DDR PC2100 RAM. According to some docs on the web this was the correct type of RAM for the 1Ghz MDD model. On a hunch, I decided to try PC2700 RAM and viola, the machine booted into OS X (10.2) and has been running just fine since. It even runs Leopard quite well despite being about six years old.