My first mac was a Power Macintosh 9600 that I bought when it was new (and very expensive). It's been sitting in storage for years now, but every so often I like to dig it out and see what I can do to upgrade it. Last time I did this I upped the RAM to 320MB and added USB and firewire cards (it actually had one of the first firewire cards out there, but it had since stopped working). All of this was done quite cheaply, especially given what the machine cost when new.
This time I installed OS X using XPostfacto. Believe it or not, the 9600 can handle up to Mac OS 10.2.8 without even upgrading its 604e processor. It's no speed demon, but it's better than you might think. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could even install the latest version of iTunes on it, so this could make a very workable jukebox for my basement. But I really need a network connection for it. At the moment I'm sharing my Powerbook's airport connection to the Power Mac's ethernet port, just to test things out and do updates, but I'd like to get the machine on my network permanently. Is there a cheap PCI wireless card that will work with the 9600? I suppose a USB-based adapter might also be a possibility. Any ideas?
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