How to and Latest firmware

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Hello All!
I'm a old mac guy, but haven't worked on macs for the last 5 or 6 years. Now I'm work with PC's, but still have 9600 running like a charm in my studio.

I just got a g4/400 computer. I'm not sure which mother board it is. But it has the 1 gig network, and the AGP video card, with about 328mb of ram.

I got this for free, because my company couldn't upgrade it to 10.5, and they were having problems with it, so they were going to through it away.

So now I have Tiger, I want to install on it, but I remember firmware is pretty important to make everything work right. So how can I check the firmware level?
What is the lastest firmware version for this computer? How do I update that?

I have 10.1.3 on there now, can I still update the firmware, or do I have to load OS 9 on there? And would 9.1 work just fine?

Any help on this would be great!

THANKS! :D
 
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Your Mac's Specs
17 inch 2 GHz C2D imac (5,1) with 3GB DDR2 RAM, X1600 (128MB memory) GPU - OSX 10.6.3
Go here to determine what firmware you are supposed to have.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86117

And according to that apple article you will probably need to use system 9 through part of the process. And yes 9.1 should be ok. But I'd download 9.2 and 9.2.2 I think first from the apple site so you can use them when your in System 9. Then you can do the firmware thingy then.

And this is a little info I found by searching my imac's help file.

To determine if you need a firmware update, you may be asked what version of firmware (also called Boot ROM) you have on your computer. To view your computer's Boot ROM version, open System Profiler in the /Applications/Utilities folder.

Hope this helps you.
 
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Thanks the8!

I plan to run only "ILife" on this mac. Do you think I should still have 9.x on there?

Rudy
 
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Thanks the8!

I plan to run only "ILife" on this mac. Do you think I should still have 9.x on there?

Rudy

picture_2-20071202-180451.jpg


Is this the Mac you picked up? The Firmware Version for that particular model is:

Power Mac G4 Firmware Update 4.2.8

Have you looked in System Profiler for this info? You can also have a look in System Prefs, down the bottom where it should have an icon for OS 9 Classic . if you click on it it will tell you if it's installed or not. At least this is what it does on my other mac running Panther.

If you do have the correct firmware installed and I would imagine you would, then why not try to install Tiger on top of 10.1.3?

I'm not sure what installation option to choose but regardless of that please make sure all your important stuff has been backed up.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2xiMac24 w Parallels 6 (1x White, 1x Aluminum), iPhone 3GS with iOS5
I think you cannot get Leopard on here. G4 867 was lowest version. I had one and chose to upgrade to Alum iMac. It will do 10.4.11 nicely. I would keep the OS 9 loaded just in case as I have. My 867 is now with my son doing the itunes and surfing thing.
 
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MacHeadCase

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Welcome to Mac-Forums, RudyMac.

Chilbear has it right. Leopard's supported hardware is G4 867MHz and faster.

On that 400MHz, I would absolutely max out the RAM: Tiger will be painfully slow if it doesn't have enough RAM to munch on.

Hope this helps. :)
 
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Hi Guys!

Thanks for the reply. I just reloaded os 9.1 on the mac. I found a cd in my old mac stuff. I'll upgrade to 9.2 today. I haven't checked the ROM yet, but I have a hunch it's not current.
Your right about the ram, I have 384, it's pretty slow. I see that I can cracnk this up to 2 gb if I have OS 10 running.

Thanks for all the info!

Rudy
 
M

MacHeadCase

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Is this your Power Mac G4?

If it is, it's what is known as a PCI Graphics. Maximum RAM, according to that chart, is 1GB.



Edited to add:

Oops! According to LowEndMac, RAM is expandable to 2GB. Sorry!

RAM: 64/128/256 MB standard on 400/450/500 MHz models, expandable to 2 GB (although Mac OS 9 will only recognize 1.5 GB) using PC100 SDRAM (3.3V, unbuffered, 64-bit, 168-pin, 100 MHz) in 4 DIMM slots
 
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That's what I thought. And that is my Mac that I got. I'm going to look for some RAM I might have laying around. It's running like a dog. LOL
Thanks again for all the help!
Rudy
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
If you are staying with OS 9, any version, 1.5GB is the maximum RAM your machine will recognize. OS X recognizes 2GB in 4x512MB PC 100 modules.
 

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