Will OS X work on a Bondi iMac?

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Pretty self explanatory. Specifically, the computer is a 233 MHz, Revision B, with 256 MB of ram and a 4 GB hard drive with a little over 2 GB free.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 17
    blue2kdaveblue2kdave Posts: 652member
    Yep, it will work. However don't expect great performance. If you want to do simple stuff like word processing, email, web surfing, you should be fine. The interface is a little sluggish, and forget about games, but it will work. I had one sitting around and set it up in our guest bedroom for or geeky houseguests. Its been a big hit.



    Good luck
  • Reply 2 of 17
    emaneman Posts: 7,204member
    It'll work. A little more RAM would make it run better though.
  • Reply 3 of 17
    I'm not sure whether adding more ram will help.

    After a certain amount, it doesn't get any faster. You will find a significant performance increase when you're using many programmes at once but not if you don't run to many at a time.

    I tried by taking out some ram and I didn't notice any speed difference.
  • Reply 4 of 17
    emaneman Posts: 7,204member
    [quote]Originally posted by Gong Rui:

    <strong>I'm not sure whether adding more ram will help.

    After a certain amount, it doesn't get any faster. You will find a significant performance increase when you're using many programmes at once but not if you don't run to many at a time.

    I tried by taking out some ram and I didn't notice any speed difference.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Considering 256MB is really the minimum you can run OS X comfortably, adding more should show some increase in speed, even if it isn't much.
  • Reply 5 of 17
    I am currently posting from my bondi 233 Rev A iMac, so I say yes, it is quite possible to run os x on it.



    I've run OS X on this machine since DP3 was out, and with each release it's become more and more useable. Up until... last week, I had 192 megs of ram in the machine, and the stock hard drive. This week, I upgraded to 384 megs of ram, and cleared some stuff off of my hard drive to have 1 gig free. Now, the system is quite useable. Which is not to say that it wasn't before, as I've used this system to do all of my work on for the last year. And not just simple word documents. I don't even have word



    Photoshop 7 and Dreamweaver MX are a dream on this machine. After dreamweaver came out, I was able to delete everything from classic on this machine, with the exception of a stripped-down 100 meg system folder to boot into for the sole purpose of burning cds, as my Que! drive is still unsupported.



    Adding the extra ram both made it faster and made me be able to run more than one program at at time comfortably. Right now, I'm streaming somafm.com with itunes, I have IE and mozilla open for preview testing purposes, dreamweaver mx, adium, iphoto, terminal, eudora, and timbuktu pro, along with a few terminal programs.



    The big difference with the ram is that the machine uses virtual memory significantly less, and more efficiently. Switching between applications doesn't drag the machine to a snail's pace, which is wonderful. Now I need to get back to php / mysql work, which I love being able to do locally.
  • Reply 6 of 17
    prestonpreston Posts: 219member
    I run OS X on my iBook 600 that only has 128MB or RAM.



    I need to upgrade bad though, multitasking Director 8.5 in classic and iPhoto and iTunes and Illustrator 10 and Quicktime Player can be hairy



    Pres
  • Reply 7 of 17
    bradbowerbradbower Posts: 1,068member
    I too am posting from a Bondi iMac. 160MB RAM, 40GB/7200RPM HD, 8MB VRAM, and I'm considering getting the Harmoni upgrade from Sonnet to get a cheap firewire port and some more speed. It's really quite decent in 10.1.4. The RAM and VRAM help, and since I don't have as much RAM as I'd like, the faster/larger HD helps with the VM a lot. Now that I don't need Classic anymore, this thing runs, as everyplace put it, like a dream.
  • Reply 8 of 17
    Not to beat it to death, but I am curious. Brad said 8 megs of vram, and the only way I thought that was possible with the bondi iMacs was with the Voodoo 2 graphics card expansion that existed for the mezzazine slot (the undocumented, unsupported expansion that existed in rev. a and b iMacs). I know there's a vram expansion slot in the the bondi iMac, and I have mine upgraded to the maximum... 6 megs. That's the 2 original megs plus a 4 meg vram chip (which go for about $20). Did I miss something here?



    And the harmoni upgrade does seem like a reasonable upgrade. What model 40 gig 7200 rpm drive did you upgrade your machine with? I at one point used a 30 gig 7200 rpm maxtor drive, but it only worked for 3 weeks before I had to go back to the original drive.
  • Reply 9 of 17
    emaneman Posts: 7,204member
    [quote]Originally posted by everyplace:

    <strong> I at one point used a 30 gig 7200 rpm maxtor drive, but it only worked for 3 weeks before I had to go back to the original drive.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Why'd you have to go back to the original drive?



    [ 04-18-2002: Message edited by: EmAn ]</p>
  • Reply 10 of 17
    I'd wait for the 10.2 update before installing OS X on a 233 MHz G3. It's going to be a dog on that iMac, but 10.2 is going to have incredible performance optimizations.



    If you install OS X now, you'll be acclimating to the new OS while fighting it's poor responsiveness, but if you wait for 10.2 you'll have a better learning experience with OS X. It's only a few months away.
  • Reply 11 of 17
    In response to EmAn, I didn't _have_ to go back to the original drive. I probably could have gotten a different drive, but regardless.



    I really don't know what went wrong. After 3 weeks of great performance, all of a sudden the computer wouldn't boot at all, not in 9 or X. Even booting off of a Norton Systemworks CD didn't make the drive work right, so I just pulled it out and put it in a beige g3 266 server.



    Of course, 9 months later the drive had a major hardware failure, after I filled it up, and to this day (2 years later) it sits on my shelf, hoping to be recovered whenever I have an extra $1200 laying around. I mean, come on, it's got 2 years of college work on it.



    As for Junkyard Dawg's comment, I disagree and say install it now. I started using OS X as of DP3 (any of you actually remember that release?) on this computer no less. When DP4 came out, I was actually able to use OS X as a decent, albeit slow, OS. Public Beta seemed to me a dream after DP4, in terms of useability and such, and then 10.0 was so much better than that.



    What I'm trying to say is this. 10.1.4 right now is prefectly useable on the 233 iMacs, if you take allowances.



    First, don't expect to play any games on it at all, with the exception of some snake clones available on versiontracker. But then again, you weren't playing games on this machine before anyway, with the exception maybe of quake. The first one.



    Second, don't expect the performance of a G4. Obviously, this isn't a G4, so vector-optimized parts of the OS (i.e. the display system) are gonna be significantly slower.



    What installing the OS will do for you, however, is quite a bit. Even on this machine, I had a 46 day uptime run, from January until a weird system kernal panic caused by my keyboard in the middle of february. Was I mad though, no, because I hadn't worried about restarting in over a month.



    The consequences of using this OS which is slow on this computer? I'm completely familiar with it, moreso than a lot of other people who've just been using it since 10.1, or 10.0 for that matter. I do all of my real work in 10 now, with the exception of cd-burning. Photoshop, Dreamweaver (coming soon) are all great on os x, and I won't be looking back.
  • Reply 12 of 17
    bradbowerbradbower Posts: 1,068member
    [quote]Originally posted by everyplace:

    <strong>Not to beat it to death, but I am curious. Brad said 8 megs of vram, and the only way I thought that was possible with the bondi iMacs was with the Voodoo 2 graphics card expansion that existed for the mezzazine slot (the undocumented, unsupported expansion that existed in rev. a and b iMacs). I know there's a vram expansion slot in the the bondi iMac, and I have mine upgraded to the maximum... 6 megs. That's the 2 original megs plus a 4 meg vram chip (which go for about $20). Did I miss something here?



    And the harmoni upgrade does seem like a reasonable upgrade. What model 40 gig 7200 rpm drive did you upgrade your machine with? I at one point used a 30 gig 7200 rpm maxtor drive, but it only worked for 3 weeks before I had to go back to the original drive.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Whoops. I meant 6.



    The drive is an IBM Desktstar 41.0GB/7200RPM with 3 year OEM warranty; I purchased it for $89 (excluding shipping) from <a href="http://newegg.com/"; target="_blank">http://newegg.com/</a>; .



    From the sound of your issues, I have to ask... did you do much troubleshooting? It doesn't sound like you came to much of a conclusion. Did you make sure to place a 4-8GB partition as the first partition (and the only startup partition) on the disk? For whatever reason, the firmware in our generation of iMacs won't accept or boot from drives larger than ~8GB in size. I didn't think they would boot at all, but it's a possibility that they'd boot--for a while--but maybe it's more like it would stop booting once enough data got on the disk to disrupt the system portions from being within the first 4-8 GB. If that's not it, sounds like the drive must just be bad, or all of your installs could be hosed. Another possibility is that your installs are hosed *and* your CD-ROM is failing, which DID happen to me and totally puzzled me. I troubleshooted for more than two weeks to no avail on this machine, until I just left it sitting trying to search for a system folder on the startup CD which I left in the drive. After a while the CD drive decided to work and the machine started up from CD and I quickly installed 9.0, 9.1, 9.2.1, 10.0, 10.1, dev tools, etc etc.
  • Reply 13 of 17
    bradbowerbradbower Posts: 1,068member
    [quote]Originally posted by Junkyard Dawg:

    <strong>I'd wait for the 10.2 update before installing OS X on a 233 MHz G3. It's going to be a dog on that iMac, but 10.2 is going to have incredible performance optimizations.



    If you install OS X now, you'll be acclimating to the new OS while fighting it's poor responsiveness, but if you wait for 10.2 you'll have a better learning experience with OS X. It's only a few months away.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    I pretty much disagree with this. Our household has two machines of this genre, and my school several more. I've got a neighbor and a couple of friends with the same model, plus people like everyplace know just as well. These old iMacs really perform decently with a few key upgrades.



    Not to flame, but let's try not talk about what we don't know firsthand. And don't get me wrong, I've talked out my ass before, too. So don't feel bad.
  • Reply 14 of 17
    bradbowerbradbower Posts: 1,068member
    [quote]Originally posted by everyplace:

    <strong>In response to EmAn, I didn't _have_ to go back to the original drive. I probably could have gotten a different drive, but regardless.



    I really don't know what went wrong. After 3 weeks of great performance, all of a sudden the computer wouldn't boot at all, not in 9 or X. Even booting off of a Norton Systemworks CD didn't make the drive work right, so I just pulled it out and put it in a beige g3 266 server.



    Of course, 9 months later the drive had a major hardware failure, after I filled it up, and to this day (2 years later) it sits on my shelf, hoping to be recovered whenever I have an extra $1200 laying around. I mean, come on, it's got 2 years of college work on it.



    As for Junkyard Dawg's comment, I disagree and say install it now. I started using OS X as of DP3 (any of you actually remember that release?) on this computer no less. When DP4 came out, I was actually able to use OS X as a decent, albeit slow, OS. Public Beta seemed to me a dream after DP4, in terms of useability and such, and then 10.0 was so much better than that.



    What I'm trying to say is this. 10.1.4 right now is prefectly useable on the 233 iMacs, if you take allowances.



    First, don't expect to play any games on it at all, with the exception of some snake clones available on versiontracker. But then again, you weren't playing games on this machine before anyway, with the exception maybe of quake. The first one.



    Second, don't expect the performance of a G4. Obviously, this isn't a G4, so vector-optimized parts of the OS (i.e. the display system) are gonna be significantly slower.



    What installing the OS will do for you, however, is quite a bit. Even on this machine, I had a 46 day uptime run, from January until a weird system kernal panic caused by my keyboard in the middle of february. Was I mad though, no, because I hadn't worried about restarting in over a month.



    The consequences of using this OS which is slow on this computer? I'm completely familiar with it, moreso than a lot of other people who've just been using it since 10.1, or 10.0 for that matter. I do all of my real work in 10 now, with the exception of cd-burning. Photoshop, Dreamweaver (coming soon) are all great on os x, and I won't be looking back.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Really good points there. Anything 3D just isn't happening on these iMacs due to incomplete graphics card support. Actually, the degree of incompleteness/support for 3D varies depending upon what revision Bondi iMac you have; Rev. A had a Rage IIc, and Rev. B and up had an ATI Rage Pro. 3D games have never been much of a concern for me though. The Sims works great, since it isn't "real" 3D, though I haven't played it since I transitioned to X late last year. Besides.. there are really a *ton* of cool puzzle games and classic games and card games on VersionTracker, too. And they don't get old the first time you beat them!



    Also, Classic was really a horrible slowdown because even 160MB isn't enough to run OS X and OS 9 concurrently at a comfortable speed.. but now that there's Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Carbon betas of DreamWeaver and FireWorks.. I don't open Classic at all anymore. It's great!
  • Reply 15 of 17
    You know, now that you mention that whole "4 - 8 gig partition" thing, I never even thought of that, but at the same time, it sounds familiar, as in I'm sure I knew that at one point. I never tried that though. I'll bet money that was it too.



    In any case, now I can go try to buy a new drive next month to upgrade this machine. I could certainly use the room, especially with my new canon s30 camera.



    And yeah, I actually did play the sims for a while on this machine before going completely over to OS X. It worked, ok I guess. In the same way that Quake II worked. All settings on minimum, lowest resolution.



    Speaking of which, anyone have any experience with Civilization III on this vintage computer?
  • Reply 16 of 17
    doobdoob Posts: 4member
    I run X on an ibook 600mhx with 640mb RAM... sometimes. most of the time it is completely unuable. Sure get it if you're gain for a laugh, and you'll enjoy the gimmicks for the first couple of weeks but comapred with 9, even with the advntages of multitasking, its not worth it till they speed it up loads and get rid of the dock and redo the finder: moving through menus is a basic ui task to be done at speed, and an interface should never get in your way!



    chris
  • Reply 17 of 17
    spartspart Posts: 2,060member
    I'm running OS X on a Bondi 233MHz Rev b. with 384MB RAM...4 GB HD ATM. Going to buy a 40 gig...X and other apps you install will suck up that available 2 gigs in no time. Don't even think about Dev Tools.
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