Back To Full Speed
I want to thank Sara and Ryan Meader of macosrumors.com for the sweet video card they agreed to sell to me. The video card is an ATI Radeon X850 XT OEM Card the fastest card I could’ve gotten for my machine. Which I’m really happy to get. I’m in no shape to purchase an Intel Mac Pro yet.
The process to get this card was tedious, to say the least. I purchased a video card from Hong Kong on ebay only to listen to my machine sound like it was ready to take off. That took about a week to get here. I contacted the sellers and they agreed to take it back but not pay for the shipping. That sucked. Jeron, a reader of mine, contacted me soon after that and offered a sweet video card only to find out that it was intended for the last model G5 that used a PCIe slot for the video card, my slot is an AGP(sorry for the geek speak).
I searched ebay and found only a few cards that were fast enough for Motion. I had to sit and wait to bid. At first I was not going to pay anything more then $250. That soon changed when all the bids went by and the prices were from $275 - $335. Damn… I had to bite the bullet and pay more than I wanted. Until I found someone misplaced an Apple card by listing it with the PC cards. I was 15 seconds away from purchasing it when my computer froze up… no kidding. The card sold for $255, my bid was for $325. The next ebay deal I was looking at was 3 days away…ahhh no! 10 days gone by and no video card.
Angela came home and said what about Craigslist? Did you look there yet? Nope, I sure didn’t. So I began searching the big cities first. Went into the for sale section under computers and searched for video card G5. Nothing. Until I hit Chicago. This really nice guy was selling his for $275 and he had a buyer not show up for the purchase. Maybe it was the person that bought that card on ebay for $255. I emailed him asking the availability and moved on to more searches. Craigslist has many locations around the world and especially here in the States. I googled search all cities in Craigslist and sure enough some brilliant mind created Crazedlist. It is beautiful when you are looking for a specific item. It allows you to search all of Craigslist is one search although they do not recommend it. I listened to that and searched all 6 regions one at a time and found only one other person that was selling a high end video card. My new friends Sara and Ryan in Maine.
After a few emails stating my case and my request, I purchased my new card through paypal and they sent it in the mail. I installed it and it works extremely well. I’m back to full speed and made a few friends along the way. Thank you so much for reaching out to me Jeron and offering your card… Howard in Chicago still has his card if anyone is looking for an ATI Radeon X800 Mac Edition AGP card. And of course Sara from Maine was so nice in her reply emails, divulging some of her family history to me. I love to meet people that way. Once I saw their site I felt so much more comfortable about the purchase, it put my mind at ease.
I haven’t been posting due to all the backed up work that has been building. Don’t get me wrong I’m making money which I love but juggling 4-5 jobs freelancing I’m finding out is very stressful and I will be writing about that next when I’m looking for work again.
July 24th, 2008 | Read | No Comments
