Mac: It Just Works...Except When It Doesn't

I bought a PowerPC Mac Mini on eBay last week. The goal: use it to reproduce problems Poker Copilot users experience on PowerPC Macs. And to improve my test lab.

The Mac Mini came from a Berlin eBay seller to Cologne on Saturday morning. But the OS X reinstall DVD wouldn't work. Turns out it was for a slightly different model of Mac Mini, and didn't like being used on my model. So back to Berlin with the Mac Mini on Monday morning.

This morning it came back to me as speedily as a well-thrown boomerang, this time with the correct DVD. At start-up, a freshly installed Mac OS X 10.4 greeted me. Nice. Exactly what I wanted. But it wouldn't connect to my wireless Internet modem. With no good reason why. Ah bugger. These are supposed to be the problems that Windows users faces. Not me in my brave new world of Apple.

So...there went the greater part of the day figuring out a solution. These are problems I enthusiastically embraced when I was a student. But not now.

The cause of the problem: I had Mac OS X 10.4. The original. 10.4.nothing. Once I got a newer version of Tiger on to the machine, life became better. Updating on a machine without Internet access made things somewhat tricky.

And best of all...when I run Poker Copilot 2.19 (a sort-of unreleased blog-readers only version) with Full Tilt, I experience the exact problem people raised. Yes. Now I can try the solution I've quietly put together.

Stay tuned...