[dcsailor40]

I have a G-3 I-Book, Model 6497, that came with 0X 9... and a disc to install 10. It has a 500mz processor... and 128 mb memory.

I love the machine... but I've never been able to successfully install 10... and the AOL 5.0 is always freezing or quiting.

I plan to upgrade the memory from 128 to 512 mb.. but do i need to do more here... ?
If so, what? I don't want to spend too much on a 4 year old laptop... but if I can get it moving again.. I want to add an airport card too.

I use it for travel/ e-mail/ simple word processing.

Thanks for the advice

[irus]

Provided that the battery is still doing well and you don't find the size of the hard drive to be limiting, RAM and AirPort upgrade should get you where you want. However, keep in mind that if you have a 10GB hard drive, there won't be much free space left after OS X install.

[alianna_98]

We had a similar machine (500 MHz, dual USB), and I had Panther running on it pretty well when we sold it late last year. I installed the airport card in it plus additional memory. You definitely need more memory. We had 386 MB in this one, but I would suggest at least 640 MB, which is what I had in another iBook (600 MHz G3). I think these ibooks had 128 MB soldered on the board, so you can purchase a 512 MB RAM chip and install that.

For email, surfing, and word processing, I think it should work just fine. At least with Panther it did for ours.

BTW, I have to agree with the second poster. Replace the hard drive if it's too small. We had 30 GB in the 500 MHz ibook (courtesy of AppleCare; the original 10 GB drive was going bad). I did the actual hard drive replacement in the 600 MHz ibook we have, upgrading it from 20 GB to 80 GB. THAT one is running Tiger now, and doing okay. Replacing the hard drive was a little hairy, but it can be done.

[andgarden]

My advice:

Money invested in that machine at this point would be money wasted.

Save up for a new mac, or buy something used with a G4 and plenty of RAM.

I just moved from an ibook 600 to a newer Powerbook with 1GB of RAM, and the difference is night and day.

[Mojo]

Adding Panther/Tiger and sufficient RAM would be a lot cheaper than purchasing a new Mac. Panther/Tiger runs just dandy on a 600MHZ G3 iBook I own and Panther was terrific on our 500MHZ G3 iMac. Moving from OS 9 to OS 10.3 made both Macs seem like brand new machines. Both were noticeably faster and rock-solid when running Panther; Tiger actually crashed on me a couple of times when using my G4 iBook shortly after upgrading.

I think that adding a new drive is over-kill and adds too much cost to upgrading this iBook, even if you do the installation yourself. And you better feel mighty confident about your chance for success before cracking that iBook case. If you do a custom OS X install you can keep it at under 2GB total (toss the extra languages, printer drivers, etc.). 8GB is plenty of space for the uses you describe.

[iDaver]

I agree with Mojo. For web surfing, email and word processing a G3 iBook works just fine. The hard disk size is somewhat limiting but again, for what dcsailor40 is using it, that shouldn't be a problem. Max out the memory at 640 and you have a very useful machine.

Airport cards are no longer available (retail) for that iBook so you'll have to find a used one on eBay or elsewhere. Also note that if you have only a CD drive, installing Tiger will require the "upgrade" from the retail DVD to CDs, via Apple.