08-13-2008, 11:55 PM

Hi all!
I'm a newbie to the Apple scene. However, I've been looking at buying a new iMac for a while. Coincidentally, I bought a house and the owner left a mac desktop here so I hooked it up. The specs are:
Power Mac G3 (PCI Graphics)
CPU: PowerPC G4 (2.6)
CPU speed: 350mhz
L2 cache: 1mb
Memory: 384mb
Boot ROM version: 1.1.2f2

With that said, I'd like to keep this and feel my way into the Mac world. (I'm a Windows Sysadmin by trade) Can anyone advise me on what to do with this machine? It's running OS X 10.3.8 (7U16) and I'd love to run Leopard (not sure the cpu will handle it though). I've already found out that I can bump the RAM to 1GB pretty inexpensively.

I don't have the admin password or anything, nor do I have any disks. I can wipe the drive if necessary but right now I can't even do software updates because the admin password blocks me.

Or, is this desktop just too old to work with (a windows machine with 384mb of RAM and 350mhz proc wouldn't be worth much)?

Any advice or comment is greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks,
Mark

08-14-2008, 08:25 AM

You have a great learner machine. It can handle Tiger but Leopard is beyond it. I would buy a retail (Black not grey) OS Install disk and it will allow you to reset the password and/or reformat. Reformatting may a great adventure for a sys admin as it will give you insight into the Mac thinking which is way different than Windows.

Maxing the ram will give the biggest bang and go from there. You will enjoy the machine but will find it will lack oomph loading the Java heavy web pages.

08-14-2008, 03:04 PM

Chilbear,
Thanks so much for your reply. So I think I'm on the right track then. I'm ordering the RAM today and I'll try to find a place to order Tiger too. Wish I could use Leopard, but that may have to just wait until I get completely "Hooked"!

I'll proceed down the road you recommended. Thanks so much, I'm pretty excited about this new adventure here...

Kind Regards,
Mark

08-14-2008, 04:01 PM

i'm sure you can find a RETAIL<- copy of tiger on ebay fairly cheap.
to boot from a cd on a mac: boot while holding "c"
to see all boot drives: boot while holding "option" (alt)

08-16-2008, 10:34 AM

There's a way to reset the password without the OS CD. I can't remember the exact command, but it involves booting the machine into single user mode and running a couple of terminal commands. What it does is reset the machine to new user mode, with the fancy video and everything. And it lets you create a new admin account.

Just do a google search for 'reset mac password without cd', or something to that effect.

BTW, this road will lead you to a point where you're agonizing over which mac to buy. Very few people that have 'tried out' a mac can resist! Even Windows admins, like myself

08-16-2008, 12:01 PM

to rest the password try this

http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_fi...user-mode.html

That will let you play around with the mac for now, until the RAM arrives and you have located that copy of Tiger (which is a really great OS by the way)