Sunday, June 06, 2010
iMac swapping
A relative of mine had a purple tray-load G3 iMac for many years. Last year they bought a new printer which required 10.3 or later. The iMac was still running Mac OS 8.6!
I knew they liked the form factor, so I found a blue slot-load G3 iMac for sale locally for only $30, which already had enough memory and disk space (the tray load did not). I put Tiger (10.4) on it, plus Open Office, and the printer driver. They have come forward only a couple of years in hardware, but at least 6 years in software. Tiger seems kind of slow (on just about any G3) but they don't seem to mind.
A teacher had given me a red tray-load for possible repair, but it had the flyback transformer problem and seemed hopeless. I was able to fix up the purple tray-load by replacing the CD-ROM and adding memory. I gave it to the teacher running Mac OS 9.1 and most of the software we used to run in my wife's iMac computer lab. She planned to donate it to a student family.
Even though the iMac computer lab had been closed for several years, all but one of the education web sites we had linked to were still there -- that really surprised me. Unfortunately, I still have a red tray-load iMac with a bad flyback taking up space...
I knew they liked the form factor, so I found a blue slot-load G3 iMac for sale locally for only $30, which already had enough memory and disk space (the tray load did not). I put Tiger (10.4) on it, plus Open Office, and the printer driver. They have come forward only a couple of years in hardware, but at least 6 years in software. Tiger seems kind of slow (on just about any G3) but they don't seem to mind.
A teacher had given me a red tray-load for possible repair, but it had the flyback transformer problem and seemed hopeless. I was able to fix up the purple tray-load by replacing the CD-ROM and adding memory. I gave it to the teacher running Mac OS 9.1 and most of the software we used to run in my wife's iMac computer lab. She planned to donate it to a student family.
Even though the iMac computer lab had been closed for several years, all but one of the education web sites we had linked to were still there -- that really surprised me. Unfortunately, I still have a red tray-load iMac with a bad flyback taking up space...
