[jon_hh_68]

I was going to install Panther on a lime iMac 266 MHz and I am asking for advice. Would it run OK if I upgraded to 128 M ram? I was planning on backing all the files up, wiping the drive, installing 9.2.2 then Panther. Anyone with experience with running Panther on this Mac?

[nsxpower]

A 266Mhz G3 with 128Mb of RAM is not something you should (although you probably could) install Panther on. Keep OS 9 on it and use it for what it is until it dies.

[biscool]

Just throw some more ram in the thing...

[Tsilou B.]

You could buy a 256MB SO-DIMM from Crucial for $113.99. With >256MB Panther will run quite well on your iMac as long as you're just using the Mac for office work, internet and maybe iTunes.

And if you're really attached to your iMac, you can buy a Harmoni G3 upgrade card from Sonnet Technologies for $349. It includes a 600MHz G3 and even a FireWire port, so that your iMac will become more than twice as fast and you can even use iMovie with a FireWire camera in Panther. One of my friends has bought this card and it works really well.

Then again, $463.99 is already more than half the price of a new eMac with G4 processor, 256MB RAM, much faster graphics card, bigger screen, bigger and faster hard drive and DVD/CDRW-Combo drive.

[JellyBeen]

OSX needs 128 megs of ram just to run .You might be able to run Safari but Office will not boot with so little ram(I tried this on a G4 400 without luck). You need more ram like the posters above have said already.

[bradoesch]

I'm running Panther on my slightly newer iMac (see sig). It runs acceptably for how old the machine is and how advanced Panther is.
Unless you're only doing email and the web, get more than 128 MB. How many programs do you want to run at once? and what programs?

[bradoesch]

Originally posted by Tsilou B.:


Then again, $463.99 is already more than half the price of a new eMac with G4 processor, 256MB RAM, much faster graphics card, bigger screen, bigger and faster hard drive and DVD/CDRW-Combo drive.

Exactly. I can't see how these processor upgrades sell very well. Recently the first upgrade for the slot loaders came out, and it's simply a 500 MHz G4. There's no way I'd want to pay more than $50 for this. I have a 400 MHz G3 right now.

[nsxpower]

Putting Panther on something as old is more trouble then it's worth. People mentioned that it is possible to "run" Panther on your machine, but would require a number of upgrades and you will be restricted to doing the most basic tasks (e-mail, internet etc). Same machine with OS 9 can do MUCH MUCH more.

I had a dual-USB iBook 600Mhz G3 with 640Mb RAM with OS X on it. A great machine that could run OS X just fine, but when you started to really use it hardcore it became slow and choked your workflow ... now 600Mhz / 2 + 640Mb / 5 ... you'be able to grab a coffee and call your grandmother in time that it boots Office v.X Bottom line, stick with OS 9 on the iMac and save your money to upgrade in the near future to something faster.

[jon_hh_68]

Well, my Mom only uses the computer for e-mail and web. She connects using AOL. Basically, it is really difficult for her to receive any e-mail with HTML and to look at modern web pages using OS 9/AOL. Very occasionally, she uses word. Also, the thing keeps crashing and it would be nice to have a more stable OS. So we are not using the iMac as a productivity machine. Would you think OS X would be good for these purposes? We'd be willing to spend for the 256 M ram but not more.

[hudson1]

I think OS X would be a worthy option for your mother and her iMac provided that you go ahead with the 256MB of RAM. Do you still have the lower slot available? If yes, then you could save some money and get the 128MB SO-DIMM for that slot and still have 256MB total. I had a 233MHz Bondi Blue machine (rev B) with 192 MB and it ran OK with 10.1 (much more stable than OS 8.6) before I sold it.

The other question that should be addressed is the hard disk drive. If it still has the original 6GB drive then you're at a very marginal situation. A 20GB drive would be a more practical size but not the bare minimum. Also, the architecture on that iMac will only support 8GB for an OS X boot partition should you want to put in a bigger drive. Certainly, if you stay with the 6GB drive then you shouldn't count on being able to load up on a whole lot of apps and pictures.

Post back with any further questions.

[jon_hh_68]

Does this mean if I put in a 20 Gb drive then I have to partition it so there is 8 G for the OS X installation? Also, how do I put the drive into the thing? How difficult is it to do? I have put drives and memory into my G4 tower. Anyone know how much the minimum installation of OS X (without classic) takes up?

Originally posted by hudson1:
Also, the architecture on that iMac will only support 8GB for an OS X boot partition should you want to put in a bigger drive. Certainly, if you stay with the 6GB drive then you shouldn't count on being able to load up on a whole lot of apps and pictures.

Post back with any further questions.

[posthumanus]

while you still have OS9 make sure your firmware is up to date

posthumanus

[JKT]

Originally posted by jon_hh_68:
Does this mean if I put in a 20 Gb drive then I have to partition it so there is 8 G for the OS X installation? Also, how do I put the drive into the thing? How difficult is it to do? I have put drives and memory into my G4 tower. Anyone know how much the minimum installation of OS X (without classic) takes up?

For the slot loading iMacs, installing a new hard drive isn't that hard, but for the tray loaders, I think it is quite tricky (especially if you have no visual guide to follow).

IIRC the absolute minimum 10.3 install is a little under 2 GB. This is without additional printer drivers, language support (other than English, of course), X11, developer tools, Internet Explorer, iMovie, etc. I assume you would leave OS 9 on there for the Classic environment? If so (together with keeping at least 1GB free for VM reasons...) you are already looking at over half your 6GB disk being used up, although you can delete a lot of OS 9 apps that would no longer be necessary (like browsers, e-mail programmes etc) - which would be OK if your mum doesn't have too many files on her computer.

Does the Lime iMac have firewire ports? If so, an alternative would be to buy a small external hard drive (e.g. 20GB) and use that as a 10.3 boot drive. No loss when you finally retire the iMac as you then have a backup hard drive for the next computer.

[tooki]

IMHO, installing a hard drive in a slot-loader is a lot easier than doing it in a tray-loader, since in the tray-loaders you have to deal with aligning the goofy chassis back into the machine.

Tray-load iMacs (basically, the model released in 1998 and the small updates to it) most certainly do not have FireWire. Not until Mac models released in late 1999 (that is, the ones with AGP) was FireWire capable of booting, and not even all iMac models after that point had FireWire.




Anyway, to answer the original question: running Mac OS X (any version) with less than 384MB of RAM is just asking for trouble: much below that amount it will run more slowly than you ever thought possible. 512MB is a much better base amount, for things like web browsing, Office, etc (and I'd say without hesitation that 512MB is absolutely the base amount needed if you're going to be running Classic). 512MB costs only about $100, anyway.

It might be worthwhile to put in a faster hard drive (any hard drive on the market today, even a base-model 20GB 5400RPM for under $50, will be substantially faster than the original drive), in part because OS X will need to use some as virtual memory, so if the drive is faster, the whole system will go faster.

tooki

[hudson1]

Originally posted by jon_hh_68:
Does this mean if I put in a 20 Gb drive then I have to partition it so there is 8 G for the OS X installation? Also, how do I put the drive into the thing? How difficult is it to do? I have put drives and memory into my G4 tower. Anyone know how much the minimum installation of OS X (without classic) takes up?

I changed the drive on my rev. B iMac. It takes a bit of time but there's nothing particularly daunting in the procedure. The hardest thing is getting the case back together correctly. You can do it.

The more lengthy excercise is installing the OS/apps/docs/etc. on the new drive. Do you have a backup drive that can store everything from the current drive?

[IceEnclosure]

nothin' tough about puttin' a new HD in a tray loader iMac. there's lots of resources on the web in pdf, etc that show ya what's up.

easy peasy.