What can I do with a couple of iMac G3s with OS 9.0 and 9.2?

[chcorey52]

You could give one to me?

[geordisjd]

My old iMac G3/DV/400 runs great, as long as you don't expect to play WOW on it. I upgraded its RAM to 1 GB. I have Mac OS 10.4.8 on it. It's great for browsing, running Word or Photoshop and it still can work in the classic mode.
What firmware upgrade did you try to use?



I'd love to get my hands on yours! There isn't an older mac that I haven't been able to fix. I'd start by using another Mac and connect them by their firewire ports, start the iMac in target mode and see about reformatting the HD from the other one. Then try to install the appropriate firmware update (I'm not at home, so I'd have to wait to check which update is appropriate).

[psylichon]

Those machines can't run 10.4.8

My old iMac G3/DV/400 runs great, as long as you don't expect to play WOW on it. I upgraded its RAM to 1 GB. I have Mac OS 10.4.8 on it.

See I'm gonna stop responding to Mac threads 'cause I'm obviously talking out my rear end. Sorry.

[fury]

See I'm gonna stop responding to Mac threads 'cause I'm obviously talking out my rear end. Sorry.

No worries, buddy, if everybody stopped responding to Mac threads cause they were afraid of saying something wrong, then nobody would respond to Mac threads. I welcome any and all input

I only have one working iMac at the moment. The other slot loading iMac lost its hard drive. It started making strange grinding noises, so I'm going to try to pull the hard drive out of the one with the fried firmware, and put it into this one.

The firmware update was 4.1.9, I believe; whichever one Apple's site tells you to apply before installing Mac OS X. Not that I have Mac OS X... Just figured having it as up to date as possible was a good thing anyway

[geordisjd]

I just figured out my processor was 500MHz (not sure how important that might be) and I just upgraded to 10.4.11. I will NOT attempt to put Leopard on this. It's running too nicely to do that.

Its firmware version is 4.1.9, so it must be the most recent.



And just to show you that even Lola approves of it:



Anyway, don't give up on an iMac G3. They're still good little computers.

[Eragon]

geordisjd,

That was very well put. Thank you. I've heard a lot from the Mac forums, especially as it regards Leopard, that the working shelf life of Macs is being limited. Apparently, Apple has decided to slowly kill off Power PC machines by establishing lower processing speed thresholds.

What is really nice is that the Mac is a truly durable machine, and that owners can expect to get many good years out of them.

[geordisjd]

Well, thank you.
I think Tiger is going to be with us for a while longer. There are still more people out there using Tiger than those using Leopard, and Apple is still upgrading it, so it's a good sign.

[fury]

So you can repair a Mac's firmware by connecting it to another working Mac via firewire and doing something?

Do tell...

I don't have a firewire cable, and as I said, these are the only Macs I have, if that makes a difference.

[geordisjd]

So you can repair a Mac's firmware by connecting it to another working Mac via firewire and doing something?

Do tell...

I don't have a firewire cable, and as I said, these are the only Macs I have, if that makes a difference.

You need a functional Mac first! (didn't you say that the other one's HD is dead?). You may want to borrow a laptop from a friend, and using a 6-pin firewire cable (borrowed or bought), after you put the G3 in target mode, you can initialize and reformat the G3's HD by using the disk utility from the other computer(use the journaled HFS+ option to initialize). Then you can install a fresh 9.1 or 9.2 OS on your HD and have a functional computer. It's now ready for you to apply the firmware update.

Now remember that you do not need firmware 4.1.9 unless you want to install Mac OS 10.2 or later! If you want to stick with OS 9, you don't need it.

[fury]

I have one working Revision A iMac, running 9.something