Recently got an old Mac (need help)

[Picc84]

I've always been a MAC fan after working with them in my classes for web design and programming, and wan'ted to get one as a backup/computer for bumming on the internet till I could afford one to run away with.

Recently my computer tech teacher had an old iMac Power PC G3 running MAC OSX 10.1 with 256mb of memory. Im wondering how I can make this work as good as possible. I just set it up, and It does not have safari or firefox, I don't know where to get an older versian of FF to run on this computer, or Safari, as Im running Internet Explorer, and its ruining not only the MAC expirence, but the browsing on it is horrible. Nothing looks right.

Any other advice? I know its a really old/ bleh MAC, but my PC is currently under the wheather with a fan problem that I have yet to trouble shoot. ++ I got this for free and it runs clean and fast.

Thanks guys!

 

[Casio]

You're not going to find much these days for 10.1, in terms of web browsing or even applications, I'd probably try to source a copy of Tiger (10.4) first, or perhaps better in your case, Panther (10.3.x), would be a good middle ground, as it's not as resource hungry and contains Safari out of the box.

But for coolness you want to downgrade to OS9, you'd probably get more performance out of it (Compared to 10.1) too.

 

[Mr. Apex]

But for coolness you want to downgrade to OS9

What?!

Naw, I wouldn't go that far. My guess is that Tiger will run perfect on it. Maybe just upgrade the RAM to the max, that shouldn't be too expensive anymore.

 

[Casio]

What?!

Naw, I wouldn't go that far. My guess is that Tiger will run perfect on it. Maybe just upgrade the RAM to the max, that shouldn't be too expensive anymore.

Given that it has PC100 RAM it probably is. 512MB is probably worth more than the entire unit now days.

 

[sesselpupser]

I'd say get a copy of 10.3 or .4 and a fresh hard drive if the one you have is an original drive. And while you're installing the drive I'd clean the dust out too...

I don't know what the maximum drive size is on a G3 but my old G4 tower had a limit of 320gb for any one drive so you might want to research that first. Obviously, going for the largest drive possible would be a good idea because (and I don't know if this is true of PC's as well or not) OS X allocates some of the free HD space as temporary RAM, so your computer will slow down as the HD fills up.

Also you might like to source a supply of spare parts, particularly CD drives; I've had a few Macs that have needed a replacement drive at some point in their life.

 

[Flerbizky]

I say burn it and decontaminate your apartment!..

Just a friendly advice, not very helpful though ;-)

 

[Omnis]

Click the apple menu and then click software update. It should update everything for you.

Don't expect it to do miracles... It's a G3.

 

[Picc84]

Click the apple menu and then click software update. It should update everything for you.

Don't expect it to do miracles... It's a G3.

I'll start with that haha

 

[Casio]

You know what I'd totally still rock? An iBook G3.

As much as I hate Apple, laptop design has only gone down hill since then, that thing is 10 years old and still looks like it's from the future.

 

[Omnis]

Oh god, not that awful thing.

 

[hamstrings]

Get the latest firmware upgrades before you upgrade to any newer version of Mac OS X! Otherwise, you may have trouble seeing anything on the screen.

I had a tangerine toilet seat iBook for a while. It was a bit sluggish. I had Unreal Tournament GotY running fairly well at 320x240: the software renderer was pretty much as fast as the RAVE renderer for the ATI Rage XL. I replaced it with a Pismo.