Throwing away rotten Apple iMacs

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I picked up an iMac G3 233MHz with 256mb (128x2) of ram, the thing is chugging?

OS 9.2.2 & OS X 10.2



Here is the kicker (as if the 256mb of ram wasn?t) it has a 4 GB hard drive with 179.7mb free?



The thing was sitting next to the side of the road to be trashed and my question is - can it be salvaged?



How much drive space does OSX take? I am guessing that is what ate up the 4 GB drive but I know Windows and you know Macs? I know Windows Vista eats up hard drive space and memory, I was thinking of searching the net for restore discs and then building it back up to speed?



http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1362?viewlocale=en_US

I am guessing Mac OS 8.1 or Mac OS 8.5 would be a good start



Here is what I know?



Serial Number XA834BYZDFN



Software Overview

System Version: OS X 10.2 (6C115)

Boot Volume

Kernel Version: Darwin Kernel Version 6.0 Sat Jul 27 13:18:52 PDT 2002;root:xnu/xnu-344.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC



Hardware Overview

Machine Speed: 233MHz PowerPC G3

Bus Speed: 67Mhz

Number of Processors: 1

L2 Cache Size: 512K

Machine Model: iMac Version = 2.2

Boot ROM Info: 3.0.f2

Customer Serial Number: Not Available

Sales Order Number: Not Available



Memory Overview

J3/Bottom 128 Mb

J1/Top 128 Mb



Back in 1998 this was a nice little machine and we would have dreamed of owning such a beast in 1993. Can it be upgraded or am I better off trashing it?



I need a copy of the System Restore Discs or borrow some...

paprochy

hehe, 1998 was 10 years ago, and 1993 was 15 years ago. I don't know why, but your reasoning just makes me giggle.



Anyway, in my opinion this computer is a novelty at this point. There's just really nothing practical you can do with it. But if you want to put it up in your garage just for the nostalgia, then that's cool.

kingofsomewherehot

It COULD run SX 10.4 (or earlier) though not all that well. The hard drive can be upgraded, as can the optical drive, the RAM could be upgraded to 512, but that's it.



There are upgrade CPU boards available, but for the same price you could go buy a used G4 iMac or iBook and get a much more powerful machine.



That machine does NOT handle Flash animation well, nor will it play h264 video... so... for web browsing these days, there are a bunch of sites that don't play nice with it That 4MB of VRAM and an old ATI mobile chip just doesn't cut it these days.



That said, with a lager HD, it could certainly run as a music server... it handles iTunes just fine!



As for OSX... even a stripped down version of the OS uses over 2 GB of hard disk ... If you include ALL the languages and drivers you can exceed 4 GB. Now throw in some Apps to make the machine useful, and a 4GB drive just won't cut it.

Marvin

I would suggest trashing it - you can buy a Mini for under £200 that is at least 6 times faster.



There's a point beyond which hardware just takes up space. 10 years from now, the same argument may not apply given that computers today are generally not as frustrating as they used to be but the price argument will still hold up.



Why use something from 10 years ago or more when something that runs so much better costs so little?



If you do plan on keeping it, I reckon you'd probably get more performance out of PPC Linux:



http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=427714



My mum has an iMac that is faster than that one and even with her low expectations, she gets annoyed by it and wants a better one. It's just not worth it IMO.

chris v

Quote:

Originally Posted by KingOfSomewhereHot


As for OSX... even a stripped down version of the OS uses over 2 GB of hard disk ... If you include ALL the languages and drivers you can exceed 4 GB. Now throw in some Apps to make the machine useful, and a 4GB drive just won't cut it.

Not necessarily true. I had a totally stripped version of 10.3 on my old FW iPod that I used as an emergency boot volume that was around 950 mb.



I used Delocalizer to strip out all the language translations, which can be over 2 gb, even if you don't choose to install additional languages on the install disk, and I dumped all but the most common printer drivers, and rummaged through apps & got rid of everything that I didn't think I'd need on a short-term basis. There's all sorts of little apps you'd probably never use, like Chess, Art Director's Toolkit, previews of Omni apps, Office, etc. that can save you another 200 mb. So even with a few useful apps installed, you could still keep it well below 2 gb.



10.4 & 10.5 grew, but I wouldn't throw anything newer than 10.3 at an old G3 iMac anyway, since it can't take advantage of 90% of the features that 10.4 introduced.

bluebell

The G3 imacs are still quite useful machines, despite what everyone says. I plan to upgrade the RAM in my 233 MHz iMac G3 and put 10.2 on it. A good web browsing/chatting/iTunes machine.



Trust me, you do not want to go through the hell that is OS 8 and to a lesser extent, OS 9, but if you want to, feel free.