Upgrading my G4

[HankHill]

I have two Mac towers I got from a ministry I'm working for. They work and are able to get online, but I want to upgrade them to a better condition. On the back it said 2002, so I want to look into updating the Ram, sound cards (i'm assuming), video card, memory, and OS.

Would it be possible to do this on my own?
Would i be able to take these to a computer repair shop and have them updated for cheap/reasonable?

Thanks for the help!

 

[harryb2448]

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Yes Hank you can do all of that on your own and G4 towers are very easy to work inside. First off correctly identify your model as there are many different versions of the G4, AGP, PCI, Gigabit Ethernet, Digital Audio, Quicksilver, Quicksilver Educational, Mirror Disc Door, MDD FW800 etc.

Boot up and go to the little Apple icon in the menu bar and select About this Mac and more information. This will tell you the precise models and operating systems. Later G4 will handle up to an ATI Radeon 9800 AGP card, unlimited IDE hard drives, sound cards not necessary but memory is a trap.

Macs use dearer low density modules so the cheaper PC high density whilst they may look the same and work for a week or two, will eventually cause problems. If the processor speed is over 867MHz you can run Leopard OS X.5 on the machine, and if slower than that Tiger OS X.4 is the faster system available.

Computer repair shops generally will simply scratch their heads, botch the job to have a go at it and overcharge. Everything we have discussed you can do yourself. It is a great learning experience as well.

 

[HankHill]

I'm going to hook them up and see what conditions they're in to see what i need to upgrade, and i'll come back here and post the information.

Thanks for the information!

 

[gsahli]

Although upgrading RAM seems reasonable, I want to caution you that those computers are no longer supported by Apple, and newer software, including something as basic as a browser, won't work.
Everyone knows those computers aren't supported, so the value of the computers is Very low - probably less than $100 each. And even after any upgrade, they'll still be worth about the same. So please think about it seriously before spending any money.

 

[HankHill]

Although upgrading RAM seems reasonable, I want to caution you that those computers are no longer supported by Apple, and newer software, including something as basic as a browser, won't work.
Everyone knows those computers aren't supported, so the value of the computers is Very low - probably less than $100 each. And even after any upgrade, they'll still be worth about the same. So please think about it seriously before spending any money.

The thing is browsers do work. I'll show you how they look and all. We used them at the ministry I work with and they work alright to get online but I want to use them as prime editing. So something basic as a browser does work...

 

[zacster]

If they work the way they are, I'd leave it at that. You aren't going to turn these into modern computers by adding memory or anything else.

 

[HankHill]

If they work the way they are, I'd leave it at that. You aren't going to turn these into modern computers by adding memory or anything else.

Why not? if you upgrade all the main features why wouldn't, I don't know a lot about computers so I'm wondering why. With a PC you could do that, why not a MAC?

 

[gsahli]

You can't speed up the CPU or the memory speed. A G4 Mac uses the abandoned PowerPC processor. It's an orphan. On PCs you upgrade things because you can make it faster to run new software. For PowerPCs there is no new software. PowerPCs use different software, compiled for the different processor.

 

[FatherTime]

Ugrading my G4

Why not? if you upgrade all the main features why wouldn't, I don't know a lot about computers so I'm wondering why. With a PC you could do that, why not a MAC?

Tell us the G4 model you have, I've done extensive upgrading on these machines for cheap and they're very easy to work on not to mention a great learning experience. My G4 MDD Dual 1.25 started out as a Dual 1.0 with an 80 GB HDD and 512 RAM. I swapped out the CPU for a Dual 1.25 (you can go to 1.42) and installed 4 Seagate 500 GB HDD's and maxed the RAM to 2 GB's I can boot OS 9.2.2 10.4.11 and 10.5.8 however the Tiger partition is by far the fastest and most reliable of the OS X's I installed 2 optical Pioneer 118L DVD drives and made a super Ripper/Burner with them. plus a Pro video card. I also installed a G4 Stealth card in the modem plug to be able to natively use my favorite old printers. It has 4 USB 2.0 ports and 2 eSATA ports. You can get a B/G speed PCI card that runs circles around the AirPort b card cheap. It lives in the Condo with a G5 Dual 2.7 and a Mac Pro 2.66 Quad Nehalem. It can do all the G5 does just a little slower. plus it'll boot 9.2.2 which I have to do to run my CAD/CAM software that requires a hardware dongle.