imac G3 uprade help needed!!!!

I have a Blueberry imac G3 that has a G3 500MHz CPU, 640MB RAM, 20GB HDD, and OS X 10.2.8 Jaguar. I really cannot afford to blow a good chunk of change on a new mac. This is my first mac.....got it a week ago for free. I was woundering if I upgraded it from Jaguar to Tiger, and made it have 1GB RAM....would it help it at all? I just want to do most basic tasks except play modern games. Like web, email, iphoto, quicktime, itunes, freeware games (free ones that take little to run), use widgets, play around with imovie, use ichat, mess with garage band a bit, do text documents, stuff like that. Also....it is a slot loading imac.....any chance of upgrading it to a DVD slot imac? Think this mac with the noted upgrades will be good for what I mentioned?

Ross

garageband won't run on it, but everything else should be fine.

http://www.macsales.com/

you can purchase upgrades there i know.

640 ram is a pretty good amount and G3 500 isn't terrible so it should run Tiger OK

congrats on your find! i also think that 640mb of ram is enough for your tasks. If you think macsales is too expensive, you can always try ebay. Or if you really wanted to, you could sell the imac on ebay. With that money +the money you were going to put into upgrade the computer, you could buy a mac Mini. The mac mini will come with tiger and will run garageband fine. It also has a combo drive that will play DVD's and burn CD's..

I_hate_windows said:

I have a Blueberry imac G3 that has a G3 500MHz CPU, 640MB RAM, 20GB HDD, and OS X 10.2.8 Jaguar. I really cannot afford to blow a good chunk of change on a new mac. This is my first mac.....got it a week ago for free. I was woundering if I upgraded it from Jaguar to Tiger, and made it have 1GB RAM....would it help it at all? I just want to do most basic tasks except play modern games. Like web, email, iphoto, quicktime, itunes, freeware games (free ones that take little to run), use widgets, play around with imovie, use ichat, mess with garage band a bit, do text documents, stuff like that. Also....it is a slot loading imac.....any chance of upgrading it to a DVD slot imac? Think this mac with the noted upgrades will be good for what I mentioned?

Ross

Click to expand...

I have a G4/450mhz in my Cube and it runs fine on 10.4.4. I have 576 megs of ram, although I'm bumping it up to 1.5 gigs soon. The upgrade that has made the most improvement so far is the hard drive. I added a 7200rpm 120gb Seagate (about $80 on Newegg) and everything is much faster, especially load times. You can purchase a DVD burner (Superdrive) for your G3, but it will cost you $200. More info here:

http://www.mcetech.com/dvdrwimacsl.html

Alternatively, if you have Firewire, you could just build or buy an external DVD burner. That's what I did for my Cube, cost around $110 or so. Crucial shows 512mb ram upgrades for the G3-500 for $96 per stick. I'd recommend upping it to a gig if you can afford to do so.

If you decide to really go all-out, it'd cost around $600 or so. That would give you OS X Tiger 10.4.4, a fast 120gb 7200rpm hard drive, a gig of ram, and a CD/DVD burner, all internal. Might be wiser just to buy a Mac Mini, lol.

trpnmonkey41 said:

garageband won't run on it, but everything else should be fine.

Click to expand...

Garageband will run. I had it running on one of my old 400Mhz iMacs for a while. Granted, it is not at all fast and you can't have more than say 3 or 4 tracks running at a time, but it does in fact run.

How about if I build an external DVD Burner (already got the drive), added a 7200rpm 80GB seagate, and made it 1gb ram? That is not too expensive. Like $150 i think. DIMM 1 has 128mb stick, DIMM 2 has 512mb stick. So add one more 512MB for 1GB. Is a G3 500MHz proccesor decent? I know it is old, but is it complete crap? Will the new HDD, Tiger, and 1GB RAM make it notecibly faster? Worth the $?

Ross