iMac 3G full upgrade

Hey Pete and Welcome to Apple Discussions,

First day I unscrewed it and tried to examine inside.

Do you know this site?:
http://www.baconeggs.co.uk/manuals/index.htm

I think there is no way, it is better to get rid of this one and buy a new one (up to 750 Mhz)

Actually 700 in the ones here in the States. The logic board swap is pretty easy and the only thing that needs to move 600-700 is the heat sink. Search that in this forum, we've talked about it a lot. I have done the 400 - 700 swap into 350s about 6 times now. (have 6 350 logic boards in my basement is how I know)

2) RAM
Apple's site writes that i can increase only up to 512 Mb PC100, 3.3V, 168-pin DIMM. But forums write up to 1 Gb. Is it true? And it is very difficult to find this RAM.
Well this is according to low end Mac:
http://www.lowendmac.com/imacs/350-mhz-imac-g3-blueberry.html
"RAM: 64 MB, expandable to 1 GB using two PC100 SDRAM (3.3 V, 64-bit, 168-pin, 100 MHz)"
Around here PC100 is easy to find. I salvage it from old PCs. 512 sticks are a little harder to find naturally.

The video is integrated, I see no way.

Right, but improved with the logic board swap.

5) CD-ROM
I want to change to DVD-ROM at least (better RW), but see no way to find slot DVD with 50pin SCSI connector cheaper that 400$.
Actually it's a special IDE connector that integrates power into the cable.
These are hard to come by but if you do the logic board swap you can use any external in a Firewire case.

Used iMac costs 50$ :))

Around Chicago I've gotten non working 400-500s for free. It's almost always the PAV so the logic boards are fine.

May I use USB Apple SuperDrive (bought for my MacBook Air) to read DVD (f.e. cinema or new MacOS installation)?

Dunno about that. Is it USB 2?

6) MacOS

I want to try X, I have install DVD 10.5.2 from my MacBook Air. Is it possible to install it? What is the system requirements for it, or it is better to download elder version?
Officially the CPU needs to be G4 running at 867MHz but I'm sure someone's hacked it by now. Tiger will run just fine in these machines. That's what I use.
Richard

I have looked and apparently no one is interested in hacking 10.5 to work on a G3.

Do you know this site?:
http://www.baconeggs.co.uk/manuals/index.htm
No, I am interesting in iMac G3 in a few days 🙂

I think you missed this:
iMac - Slot loader (11.5Mb pdf file)

Hey MacMikeG3,

I have looked and apparently no one is interested in hacking 10.5 to work on a G3.

Yah when I said that I didn't realize how graphics intensive Leopard is. This is from:
http://lowendmac.com/musings/mm07/0913.html
Dan Knight:
"There have been a few G4 upgrades for the slot-loading iMacs, and it is possible for an iMac with a G4 upgrade to run Leopard - slowly. Because of the video demands of Leopard and because these are slow G4s (400-500 MHz) on a slow system bus, expect things to be a bit sluggish if you get 10.5 running. (See our article on Unsupported Leopard Installation for tips on putting OS X 10.5 on unsupported Macs.)"
So no doubt that it could be done but it's not worth the trouble.
I use Tiger on all the 350 - 700s that I set up. We even run Garage Band 3 on them in the music classes.

Richard

Leopard does not run on G3 Macs because it is compiled to only work with AltiVec-enabled PowerPC processors and Intel processors. G3 Macs do not support AltiVec (aka Velocity Engine); only G4 and G5 Macs do.

So the only possible way to get Leopard to run on a G3 Mac is to replace the G3 with a G4. I have a Pismo PowerBook. It originally had a G3, but I upgraded it to a 550 MHz G4. Using the +install Leopard on a supported Mac and move the hard drive method+, I can get Leopard to run on my Pismo (very sluggishly).

Just thought I'd point out that the Macbook Air Superdrive is only designed for use by a Macbook Air (something to do with drivers I assume), but someone somewhere probably has a way around that.