OS X on imac 3G

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volt01

Limp Gawd
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Jul 8, 2009
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I recently acquired an imac G3 from my aunt, she was gonna just get rid of it.I haven't had time to play with it at all, so I'm don't know what the specs are yet, I'll check tonight hopefully. However, I was wondering if I'd be able to run OS X on this ancient piece of elementary school history. Because I'd love to have an apple pc to play around with, especially os X, without paying over $1,000

*Changed 3G to G3
 
do you mean an iMac G3? If so, yes, OSX will run on it but it's sloooow, especially if it's an older model. You may have to do a firmware update before you try to boot from the OS X disk. There's been cases where just the OS X installer kills the logic board (aka motherboard) trying to tell you it needs to be updated (has happened to me).
 
It will run versions up to 10.4. It may be unusable in OS X depending on how little memory it has and the CPU clock speed. My young neices have 10.4 installed on 333MHz iMac G3 systems with 384MB and they can't stand the slow speed.
 
Yup. OSX 10.5 requires a 867mhz or faster processor (I believe that was the speed). So you'll have to go with 10.4 (Tiger).
 
You can get it to run, but it will be (like the others said) soooo slow. Even on the Mac in my sig, it's very slow.
 
If you plan on running OSX on it, definitely upgrade the RAM some, I'd put at least 512MB in there, 1GB would be better. I think all the iMacs would take 1GB of RAM, but I honestly don't remember.
 
TheLordsServant said:
If you plan on running OSX on it, definitely upgrade the RAM some, I'd put at least 512MB in there, 1GB would be better. I think all the iMacs would take 1GB of RAM, but I honestly don't remember.
Click to expand...

I now the slot-loading ones do, but I think the tray loading models are limited to 384, maybe even 256. But good luck finding cheap 512MB PC-100 modules.
 
ebay has some reasonably priced PC-100 512MB low density modules. A couple of months ago I got 1.5GB of some (3 x 512MB PC-100 DIMMs) for around $23 shipped. The seller had a bunch of listings and combined shipping.

But yeah, anyone should check the max memory of the particular model before buying memory. http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/index-imac.html Expand the details to see what "unofficially" works. One iMac G3 model only officially supports up to 2 x 64MB, but does work with up to 512MB (256MB x 2), for example.
 
pxc said:
ebay has some reasonably priced PC-100 512MB low density modules. A couple of months ago I got 1.5GB of some (3 x 512MB PC-100 DIMMs) for around $23 shipped. The seller had a bunch of listings and combined shipping.

But yeah, anyone should check the max memory of the particular model before buying memory. http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/index-imac.html Expand the details to see what "unofficially" works. One iMac G3 model only officially supports up to 2 x 64MB, but does work with up to 512MB (256MB x 2), for example.
Click to expand...

Yeah, ebay is the way to go. Even newegg is really expensive for older memory.
 
Leopard will run on a G3 - either via Target Disc mode or with a hard drive swap. On the G4 its only a few openfirmware lines away to a native install.

Note that 10.5 will be slow as sin (as Quartz Extreme and Core Image probably are not supported). Tiger would be better then Leopard. Panthar should run faster then Tiger
 
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