Dan Knight
- 2007.05.29
Making New Mac Users with Old iMacs and
Tiger
Bill Brown writes:
Yo Dan,
I've no idea how to respond to mailport threads, so I'm going
straight to you. In spite of all the vintage Macs I keep going
here, I've just been too damned busy with a major remodel of my
home for several months to pay close attention to the
Leopard-on-a-G3 thread. A fast look this morning tells me I've a
lot of ketchup to do on this subject. It is important to me. You
see:
Up at our local senior center, we have a home grown, no budget
Mac program of the highest order. We teach Mac basics to the
codgers so that they might get pics of the grandkids, argue with
former foxhole buddies how they single-handedly won WW II, have a
shot at writing the Great American Novel, or any of a thousand ways
of goofing off with a Mac. We also loan out Macs to seniors wanting
to try 'em out in their homes without risk to the Social Security
check. And, since the nearest legitimate Apple shop is two counties
and two hours away, we also fix Macs for seniors. The key here is
no budget. We survive on donations of Macs and Mac stuff relegated
to the basement, closet, garage, or attic. Over time and with
careful husbanding, we get just the right pieces we need to do what
we gotta do.
A year ago, we made the big jump from Classic to Tiger. But
nobody donates the latest and greatest. Tiger is not "supported" by
Apple on the early 233-333 Bondi blue and fruit flavored iMacs. So
a lot of them started heading for the basement. We had three of
these early iMacs at the senior center. I wanted to know if
"supported" was a weasel word as Apple uses it. Would Tiger work on
an early iMac? It would on an even older Beige G3 of mine with the
help of XPostFacto.
But this is not an experience to introduce newbie seniors into the
world of Mac. I've a bench gadget I call a Wiebe dock (actually a
Wiebe
Combo Dock) that lets me kludge a bare IDE hard drive via
FireWire onto a FireWire Mac. I used this tool to kludge a bare
6 GB drive removed from a 233 iMac onto an available iMac G5.
Using the G5's install DVD, I simply told the installer to install
Tiger, iLife '05, and AppleWorks onto that 6 gigger. Reinstalled in
the 233 iMac with RAM bumped to 256 MB, that ancient iMac booted
right into Tiger, joined our network, and logged right on to the
Web without a burp. We were impressed. At that moment, we knew we
were going into the Tiger business!
...once booted, we have had no issue
whatsoever with the early iMac being able to do Tiger.
Three iMacs isn't sufficient. Our class size is ten students. We
needed iMacs if we were to drag ourselves out of teaching the now
grossly out of date Classic. So we went on a beg, borrow, or steal
campaign for auld iMacs. We now have twenty ancient iMacs up and
humming in Tiger. Ten are in our classroom. Two are in our library
doing yeoman public Internet access. Two are being used for
development. And six are available as loaners for seniors to learn
and play Mac at home. All are running Tiger just fine. Indeed, we
have not had a single glitch of any kind in their first year in
service. Glitches with us learning how to teach, configure, and fix
iMacs for sure - but once booted, we have had no issue whatsoever
with the early iMac being able to do Tiger.
We run a reduced iLife suite on the latest 10.4.9. Garage Band,
iMovie, and iDVD will not work with the G3 of these iMacs. Nor will
the iWork suite work. No real issue here. We can teach and seniors
can do all they want to do with iPhoto and iTunes from the iLife
'05 suite right alongside Safari, Mail, Text Edit, and good ol'
AppleWorks. Our library Tiger iMacs even have Microsoft Word for X
on 'em. You might think this a bit stripped down. But it all works
fine doing all that is expected of it. And, no, it is not horridly
slow or pokey at all. At least not with these apps as they are used
by our clients. We are in the Tiger business.
But what will October and Leopard bring? Obsolescence? We don't
need that in our no budget program. Will Leopard run on our ancient
iMacs? Maybe run on our few slot loader (FireWire) iMacs? Let us
hope so, even if "unsupported". Nobody is about to start donating
iMac G5s yet. Or will we start to slowly slide backwards sticking
with Tiger so long as it is somewhat relevant in a Leopard and even
post-Leopard era? We shall see.
Our solution will not impress any geek nor even those in the DTP
and other digitally power hungry trades. What our solution does is
put Mac on the map in a remote area that Apple has no interest in.
Our no budget salvage work has created one significant bunch of new
Mac buyers in an area where there would have been none. Our work
has driven a few of us to become damned good at supporting Macs
where there is no support. And our enthusiasm has created quite a
number of "changers" from the peecee world. Nothing heavy duty.
Just Mac basics.
And we want to see our ancient iMacs pushing the envelope for a
long while longer.
Bill Brown
Anacortes, WA
Anacortes
weather cam
PS: Yeah, on a 6 GB hard drive. This is what many of these early
iMacs came with. Their ROM or whatever will only see up to 7.42 GB
anyway. So 6 GB is what we develop for. It works thus. From the
install DVD, be very cautious to avoid loading anything you do not
need. The operative word here is "deselect". You have to deselect
all this 21st century stuff to get it down to where the installer
will even like these puny hard drives. No languages or extra fonts
for the system, nor for AppleWorks. We restrict our printer drivers
to Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and GIMP only. No Zenio reader.
Only iTunes and iPhoto are installed from the iLife '05 suite.
iPhoto from iLife '06 will not run on a G3. We didn't bother even
trying iTunes from '06. When loaded, we go back and use the
freeware Delocalizer to
strip out some 600 MB of unnecessary language files. We even run
the freeware Trim the Fat to
rid Intel code, but this saves us only 15 MB or so; not a big deal.
On the tray loader iMacs, we delete the AirPort utilities. This
gives us a load of about 2.8 GB after journaling is done. That is a
48% or so load on a formatted 6 GB drive. Decent.
We have added a couple of games familiar to seniors. These along
with a couple of pic and music files used in our classes complete
our load.
With every Apple software upgrade, we run Delocalizer again
stripping out some reinstalled language files.
We have prepared a master drive for our load and clone it to
other drives using the freeware feature of SuperDuper. A little key step is to
do the Repair Permissions thing at the end, which fixes something
called a kernel link. Works every time.
We have found that with only the one printer driver needed, we
can get this load onto a 4 GB drive from the very earliest iMacs.
But we don't use 4 GB drives. Rather, we downsize 10 GB drives from
our low-end slot loader iMacs to 7.38 GB. We've salvaged sufficient
20 GB drives for each of our slot loaders, freeing up 10 GB drives
rather than force us to use 4 GB in a couple of our earliest
iMacs.
One of our development iMacs is being used to very cautiously
strip items from the root Library folder to see what can be done
here. We don't expect much success with this idea. If we wanted to
be brutal, we would strip out fonts, and a bunch of the little
applications and utilities. But we want our iMac trainers to look
as out of the box as possible. So we leave 'em in. Besides, I've
begun to suspect that several of them are called up in the
background by scripts from the system or the major apps to do their
something then go away. So they stay. If anyone has posted a
definitive list of what can be stripped without loss from either
root or applications, I'd appreciated being directed to it. I've
not been geek enough to find such a list myself.
Bill,
Thanks for sharing a wonderful story. I can give
you one additional tip right off the bat - something I learned just
last week: Deleting a photo in iPhoto doesn't delete it from your
hard drive. You have to empty the iPhoto trash. Doing that cleaned
out 1.5 GB of unnecessary files on my boot partition.
I run Delocalizer every few updates, and
SuperDuper is the greatest Mac backup and disk dup program I've
ever run across. Thanks for the info on Trim the Fat, a program I
wasn't familiar with. I'll include a link for our readers.
Would it be safe to assume that you're turning off
Spotlight and the Dashboard?
As to G3 support in Leopard, we're all hoping for
it. Regardless, your Tiger iMacs are going to be capable of serving
your seniors for years even if Leopard can't be installed.
Anyhow, you've come up with some clever solutions
and created a whole new group of Mac users with your low-end
solutions. Keep up the good work!
Dan
Sometimes Buying a Newer Mac Makes More Sense
than Upgrading
Jay Snyder writes:
Dan,
Once again, great site!
Let's not forget that sometimes the best
upgrade is a newer used Mac.
I'm seeing some interesting dialog about the G4 MDD upgrade
article. Let's not forget that sometimes the best upgrade is a
newer used Mac. I was considering some of the many high clock-rate
CPU upgrades available for my Dual 1 GHz
Quicksilver but had concerns about the lack of a L3 cache and
the 133 MHz memory bus of this model becoming a bottleneck.
So I started looking at used
G5s. I picked up a 2005-model Dual 2
GHz Power Mac G5 for $1,000 in January with 1 GB RAM, a
250 MB hard drive, and a much faster, dual-layer SuperDrive. I sold
my Dual 1 GHz Quicksilver with 1 GB RAM, original 2x
SuperDrive, and a 120 GB (upgraded) hard drive for $600. With
shipping figured in, as well as eBay selling fees, net upgrade
price was about $475. This is about what many of these CPU upgrades
were going for at the the time.
I probably could have gotten about $200 for the dual 1 GHz CPU
card on eBay, so the net upgrade price for the dual 1.8 GHz upgrade
at the time would have been about $400. I would have seen a
real-world performance increase of about 35%. My G5 benefits from a
faster memory bus, greater memory limit (4 GB for this model,
8 GB for the higher-end models), much faster SATA hard drive
interface, no 128 MB ATA hard drive
size limit, and a much faster SuperDrive.
The 2 GHz Dual G5 encodes video twice as fast as my 1 GHz Dual
G4 did for only a little more money than the the upgrade CPU would
have cost. Heck, it even has 18 months left on its AppleCare.
This philosophy can be applied to all levels. If you have a
pre-G3 Power Mac, consider a used G3 or low-end G4. If you have a
G3 (esp. a Beige), consider a G4, etc.
I have done the upgrade route in the past. I had the excellent
PowerLogix Bluechip 900 MHz G3 upgrade in my Pismo, which brought it nearly to 1 GHz
PowerBook G4 levels for some tasks, and I kept the flexibility of
the Pismo platform. This cost much less than a new PowerBook G4 at
the time. About 9 months later, after falling in love with the new
aluminum PowerBooks, I got an excellent deal on a 1 GHz 15-inch aluminum PowerBook G4. I
put the original CPU back in the Pismo, and sold the CPU upgrade
and the Pismo separately for only $300 less than the PowerBook cost
me.
The bottom line is consider all your options and don't get too
attached to upgrading your current hardware. With a little
creativity, you can find that trading up to a newer system can cost
less. Plus your old system can help enlighten some poor blighted
Windows™ user and bring them into the fold!
Regards,
Jay Snyder
Jay,
Thanks for the reminder. The value of upgrading
your current Mac depends on how many components you want/need to
upgrade vs. the cost of a newer Mac that's already got what you
want. For instance, I'm very happy with the value of my dual 1 GHz
Power Mac G4 even after putting in a bigger hard drive, adding
1 GB of additional RAM, and installing two USB 2.0 cards. For
my current purposes, it's all the power I need.
For someone who is otherwise quite happy with
their Power Mac G4 (or any Mac) and wants to improve just one area,
an upgrade is usually the best choice. You keep the hardware you're
comfortable with and work better on it. If it's more than one
upgrade, especially if one of them is the CPU, it may well make
more sense to buy a newer Mac and sell the old one. I've done that
a couple times myself.
Dan
Compact Flash Won't Boot Pismo
Jeffrey Bergier says:
Hey Dan,
I recently got a Pismo. I love
it. However I want to run OS 9 from a compact flash card. But
the hard drive inside the Pismo is 18 GB, so I don't want to throw
it out. It is perfectly good. I have a CF PCMCIA card reader I use
on a my PowerBook G4 and OS X without flaw. However, I for the
life of me cannot get it to work on the Pismo. In OS 9 it
causes the Finder to crash, and in X it does nothing. It even says
no information available in the system profiler. It is a Dazzle
PCMCIA reader and a PNY 256 MB CF card.
I was planning to get a new reader and card if I could get this
setup to work. Is this a hardware problem with the Pismo or the
PCMCIA or the CF card? is the Pismo specific about PCMCIA
cards?
Thanks for your help
Jeff
Jeff,
I don't have a Pismo, so I can't answer
specifically. Since first publishing the article on using flash in
a PowerBook, I have learned from Addonics that there are two kinds
of Compact Flash cards: one is designed to work like a hard drive,
the other works as a removable media drive. You need to use a CF
card with "fixed disk mode" or UDMA, so the next step is to check
whether your PNY card supports it.
I've used a couple of different PCMCIA adapters,
and they both work the same, so I don't suspect that would be your
problem.
Good luck with this project. And as we posted today, it's even possible to
boot OS X from Compact Flash.
Dan
Addonics Compact Flash Adapter Questions
Grant Davis writes:
Hi Dan,
I was rather pleased to hear that you has tried out one of those
brilliant adapter cards. On a side note, Addonics' 2.5 inch to 3.5
inch adapter I thought would be handy reusing the laptop drives I
would replace with the CF adapter in other desktops.
I too have a 1400 I would love to
try these out on, but I wanted to check something first. I know you
tested the single slot card, do you know if the dual slot card will
work in a PB 1400 with two cards?
Is it possible that the dual slot card may not work in any IDE
PowerBook?
I also have a PB 190cs I would
like to try this out with as well one day, it only has a 500 MB
hard drive, and I wouldn't need a very large card for it anyway.
But if it could use two cards, it may be worthwhile setting up a
second for virtual memory.
Kind regards,
Grant Davis
Grant,
The PowerBook 1400 uses a 12.5mm thick drive, so
you'll have no trouble at all using the dual CF adapter. Addonics
didn't have any in stock when I contacted them, which is the only
reason I didn't get a dual card adapter. For the extra $5, it's
worth it, and it should work in any 'Book with an IDE hard drive,
as there's usually a little space around the drive to allow for air
circulation.
Addonics is sending me the adapter that will let
me use this card in one of my desktop Macs, so I can do speed
testing on a faster bus.
Drop me a note once you've tried this out in your
1400 and/or 190.
Dan
Booting SCSI Macs with Flash Drives
Clae writes:
Dear Dan,
I've just ordered an external SCSI PCMCIA card reader/writer.
I've long had a notion that these could be used to create a
solid-state boot drive by using a flash card in a PCMCIA adapter;
so I've decided put my money where my mouth is and put that notion
to the test. I'll write again with the results.
The drive is called a Spyrus
RD300; it has its own power supply, high density 50-pin SCSI
connectors, termination, and supports two Type I/II or one Type III
PCMCIA cards. If it boots, I'll attempt to convert it into an
internal drive.
Clae
Clae,
Best wishes for this project. Be sure to let us
know whether it works or not.
Thanks!
Dan
Video Conferencing Requirements
Hi Dan,
A relative of mine ask my advice on getting a low-end iBook for
her home school kids to take a video conferencing online class. I
suspect it will take a lot more computer. I have not done anything
like this myself and have a lot of questions about what kind of
hardware is needed. Is there somewhere on the net I can get some
answers or might you or your crew look to an article?
I wonder about video card requirements in a laptop or desktop?
Is a G4 going to be much better than a G3? I did read your article
on the iMage. I am a bit surprised I have never seen a article like
this anywhere. Maybe I just missed it?
Thanks
Roger Harris
Roger,
I'm still living in the dark ages. None of my Macs
have a built-in iSight, and my only webcam is an older USB device
that only works with Windows. I have almost no experience with
video chat, let alone what you might need for video
conferencing.
I suggest you get in touch with the people
offering this online class to determine what their system
requirements are - whether they support Macs, if the student needs
a webcam, how much bandwidth is required (dialup vs. broadband),
etc.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
