Old G3 Ibook help

My friend just got a 500ghz Ibook for writing. I was playing around with it tonight. It is a G3, and has OS9 and OSX 10.0.4...She really would like to do word processing with the Microsoft Suit, now I have a copy of it, but I tried to upgrade the operating system to OSX 10.2 and during the install it said that the mac was incapable of upgrading.

Does anyone know of any opensource programs out there that would work on this older version of mac? Or any way of fixing this, or where to get an older version of Microsoft Word, or even AppleWorks which didn't come with the computer?

Or even a solution to this problem! Help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Smesh

I think that ibook should support at least os x 10.2, as long as she has the minimum ram and hd space. you may need xpostfacto to install it if its giving you problems.

You can't upgrade 10.0.x to 10.2x. You'll have to upgrade to 10.1 and then to 10.2 or do a complete install of 10.2. This link will explain it: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107037. As Macman mentioned you need to have enough RAM and storage available but you should be able to go to Panther on this model if you want to.

Whenever I try to install the 10.2 disc, there are no popups theres a little ! in a red circle on the hard drive and it just says that It cannot be installed on the hard drive...any ideas?

Is it the full Jaguar installation disk? Also, how large is the HDD and how much free space is there? Have you tried formatting the drive first and then installing Jaguar?

Have you run Disk Utility or the Apple Hardware test CD? What installer disk are you using? If it's for another computer it may not work in the G3 iBook. Do you have enough empty hard disk space? The 10.2x installer wants about 300 mgs for swap files.

I have not run Apple Hardware test, I did some stuff with disk utilty...but I didn' tknow exackly what to do???

Its 500mhz, 192mb ram, 10gb hard drive...

It is currently running Mac OS 9.1

It came with a install CD for Mac OS 10.0.3

I would like ti install Mac OSX v. 10.2 so I can install the Microsoft Suit which requires 10.2.8 to run...

What someone suggested above was to install 10.0 then install 10.1 then install 10.2...I'm picking up 10.1 from a friend in a few hours to try this...any other ideas to get 10.2 to load? Look above for problems I've been having.

XPostFacto doesn't work on my version of the IBook, but I'm guessing that is because I should be able to install 10.2 without it.

Thanks soo Much for all your help...Answers to all my new questions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Smesh

The suggestion to install 10.1 was because you mentioned "upgrading" from 10.0 to 10.2. If you're doing a full installation, there's no need to start first with 10.0 or 10.1 (or any OS for that matter). You're correct that you won't need XPostFacto. My suggestion would be to boot the machine from the Jaguar installation disk, then from the Menu bar, launch Disk Utility. Use Disk Utility to completely format the HDD. Then try the installation process again. By the way, you're going to want more than the 192 MB of RAM to run OS X effectively on that machine.

could the problem be that there is not enough ram. possible it is reading the amount of ram and then saying no. i don't think this is the reason but i would defiantly up the ram to use os x.

I Got It! I couldn't install a fresh copy of 10.2 because the CD's he gave me were upgrade disks so I had to do the upgrade process. So I just installed 10.2 last night after installing 10.0 then 10.1 then 10.2...and now I'm putting everything on there. It works great!

Question, what kind of ram do these old G3's use?

Thanks!

Smesh

Glad you got it to work. I believe they just use PC100 SO-DIMMS. You can find good deals on Newegg.com for it.

Thanks!