A blast from the past...

[ffutures]

Today's eBay bargain was something a little special - an old iMac G4. Not sure what I want to do with it yet, and it may be a complete white elephant, but the price was right. VERY right, considering that there's an old price ticket marked at £900+ under the base!




This was sold as non-working (and without the keyboard and mouse, which fortunately I had). When I got it home and plugged everything in it worked. Of course it isn't exactly state of the art... It booted with the old smiley Mac logo, before eventually going to OS-X, and even then it's a bit primitive...



700mhz, 256mb RAM, 40gb hard disk, and OS-X 10.1. A DVD drive of some sort, haven't yet tested if it writes or is just DVD-R. And the only browser is (spit) Internet Exploder for Mac.



But although this version of IE has serious problems with most web pages I've tried I was able to get a network connection immediately



I think that best thing I can do is probably
(a) upgrade the memory - I think another 512mb SODIMM is the most that can easily be put in, but I would welcome correction and
(b) install Tiger (the most recent OS I have, and I think the last to support PPC processors).
But it'd still be only 2/3rds the clock speed of my iBook G4, with less RAM, and that's already struggling a little. Are there any good alternatives, e.g. a PPC linux that actually has some speed etc. advantages over OS-X?

I really love the aesthetics of these machines, the whole "giant anglepoise lamp of doom" look, so I hope I can come up with something to do with it. If not, there's always eBay...

later - just realised that "Combo" on the label underneath means it is a DVD reader, CD read/write.

update - took a look inside. There's no airport card, the slot is empty. It looks to be pretty easy to replace both lots of RAM (the bit that was not supposed to be user-replaced is behind 4 torx screws and easily accessed) and up it to 1gb. REALLY needs vacuuming in there... I think I'll sort the RAM first and worry about WiFi if I ever need it. Annoyingly, I think I gave away some RAM suitable for the hidden memory board a few weeks ago.

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Provided the airport card is working, it's a box that will access sites on the internet that are not too taxing; could be useful for a child or elderly relative say. It plays DVDs and CDs, and MP3s and so on, so it could be an entertainment system for a spare room.

I became a little bit frustrated trying to support a G4 Powerbook a few months ago because websites that used to work perfectly well on PPC (YouTube, say), seem to have upgraded their codecs so that they don't really now. There's a program Mactubes that helps with this.

I definitely did better than IE for a web browser though. I think I settled on Ten Four Fox

Libre Office (I think) has a PPC version even up to fairly recent versions -- that is by some margin the best office suite you can use for it.

I think I used an archive version of VLC for media playing.

There's a summary video someone's put on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUFDl1Y_s_4

Or you can use this as the basis of a serious hack -- I think this bloke's done some cool stuff:
http://www.dremeljunkie.com/2011/02/summary-of-imac-g4-mods.html

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

No airport card - if I decide to keep it I'll probably get one, they seem to be around, but I think sorting out the RAM and OS take priority.

I've got Libre Office and Microsoft Office for Mac on my ibook G4, also an old version of Firefox (though I mostly use Safari), all work reasonably well but of course this has more memory and is faster than the iMac.

Some of the modifications look very interesting, but I need to be realistic - this is probably going to end up as the machine I keep in my bedroom for occasional DVDs and internet access if I can't be arsed to get up to get the ibook or my ipad; it won't be used much. I don't want to spend a fortune and a lot of time modifying it.