New to mac... help me?

So my friend gave me her old mac computer. She couldn't remember her password to log in, so I just reinstalled the operating system. The cd said "Mac OS X install" on it, and when the computer starts up it says OS X.

It won't seem to let me download and install firefox 2, or safari 1.2 though. The firefox website says, "MAcOS 9 and earlier not supported," and won't even let me download.

Safari downloaded, but when I try to install it, it says "This software requres Mac OS X 10.3 or newer."

The main reason I accepted this computer was so I could test my websites I make in safari.

So what can I do about this? If I sound stupid, forgive me... I've never really done much with macs before.

And I'm not sure if that "prefix" I had to select is correct, by the way.

you'll need to figure out what kind of mac it is and what os it's running.

my guess is you'll need to find a newer os.

How do I find that out?

And what's the newest os for mac?

well, is it a notebook, or imac, or powermac? what does it look like? does it have any printed info anywhere on the mac itself (even under the battery if it is a notebook style mac).

it would be hard to tell if OS X 10.4.x (Tiger) would even run on a machine without knowing what it is.

Well, it says imac on the monitor. It's like a half dome, with the monitor sticking off the top of it.

sounds like an imac g4.

should easily run 10.3 (panther) or 10.4 (tiger). you could check craiglist or ebay for used copies. should be able to find them cheap.
not sure if there are separate versions for ppc macs and intel macs, but if you see different versions, make sure you get the ppc version.

i'm sure someone else will be by soon to give even more detail...

Yeah, it looks like that's what it is. Thanks.

Go to the blue apple in the menu bar and choose About This Mac. That will tell you the OS version it's running. Then click on More Info. The newest version OS is 10.4.10.

Yeah, I found that. It says it's 10.1.5. I don't see a "more info," though. It tells me in this screen about the memory and the processor, but nothing else about it. I'm curious if it would tell me anywhere how many GHz or MHz it is?

That's a very old version of OS X, relatively speaking. It's not all that stable, and fewer and fewer applications will run on it. Safari won't, as you discovered.

You should update the OS as high as you can through the Software Update Preference. Not sure how high you could take it. Maybe up to 10.3x, which would be a vast improvement. Even 10.2x would be much better. You might end up having to buy Panther, the last big OS jump, on eBay, or Tiger, the current OS, at an Apple store, to make the machine usable.

If About This Mac has no info on the amount of RAM installed or the processor speed, I'm not sure where you'd find it with version 10.1. Maybe in the Preferences somewhere.