iMac G4 - Making the old girl the best she can be...

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iMac G4 - Making the old girl the best she can be...

Hi everyone,

I've always loved the old iMac G4's and after seeing how cheap they were on eBay I thought I'd get myself one. I wanted a little project for myself and have ended up buying two of them, one is in cosmetically very good condition, but the other was once owned by a heavy smoker and the case was heavily stained. Fortunately it turned out that the clean one only needed a replacement motherboard (something that did work in the other doner). So after a little bit of fiddling I managed to get the old girl up and running (and for only £70!).

I'm a bit of an apple newbie, so I hope that you guys can help me out a little with a few question I have...

- What is the latest version of mac I can run on it, and is there anywhere that I can buy it from these days?

- I'm unsure of what wireless card I need, I have a 17" 1ghz model so I understand that I need a airport extreme card. Are there many different versions of this card and do I need to be careful with which one I buy?

- I'd like to use a Bluetooth apple keyboard and mouse, would I need to have a third party dongle, or should I just use a third party wireless keyboard and mouse?

- I will be upgrading both the internal and semi-internal ram modules, but I can get the spec from the cards when I open her back up again. Am I right in saying that 1gb is the max for each of these cards?

I think that's all lol,

Any help or comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Tom in the UK.

Posted on Jun 2, 2012 10:52 AM

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Answer 1

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-Rotten Apple-

Level 1

45 points

Jun 2, 2012 11:18 AM in response to Tom Wazza

Since you have 1GHz G4, you can run Leopard (10.5) if you have atleast 512MB of RAM (which you most likely have) and sufficient disk space (which you most likely have as well). Leopard is however very often price bit high in my opinion because we are talking about an operating system which is unsupported by Apple, kind a same if you would buy Windows 2000 altough of course OS X is more secure (Windows 2000 does not have built-in firewall etc.).

You need this kind of card:

http://www.johnmasone.com/computerparts/pics/38.jpg

I think there is atleast European and American versions, difference between those were atleast in my case that American version did not support as many WLAN channels as the European did. I for some reason changed the default channel (seven) in my router to something like 13 if I remember correctly and one of my Macs did not see the router at all because of this while all other computers worked fine. After I discovered that that Mac had US type of card I changed to lower channel and it worked fine.

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