How can I update the Internet Explorer on a Powermac G3?

No Safari for anything less than ISX.

Those errors are expected, the old IE just can't handle todays Internet. 😟

http://lowendmac.com/thompson/06/0103.html

Might try the original Browser, iCab 3.0.5...

http://www.icab.de/dl.php

It would help if you gave us more specifics about your G3.

CPU speed, RAM amount, HD size.

Microsoft discontinued IE for Mac in 2003 The last version of Internet Explorer for Mac was 5.2.3.

Finding older versions of IE and other software maybe difficult.

Depending on your G3,

If you want to stay with the older "classic" Mac OS, you maybe able to find, purchase and install older OS install discs of OS 9.

You maybe able to run OS 9.1 or 9.2

If your PowerMac is fast enough and has enough RAM, you might, also, still be able to find, purchase, and install OS X 10.2.8 Jaguar or with the help of a special helper app OS X 10.3.9 Panther.

Safari is an OS X browser and not available for OS 8 or 9.

Finding older version of the OS and other apps not to mention any of the hardware maybe hard to difficult to find.

We need to know about the Mac, in question, before any of us can advise you further.

As a side note, instead of spending a lot of time energy and maybe cash to upgrade this very old Mac.

Have you considered maybe looking online at eBay, local sellers or Authorized Apple resellers to see if there are any fairly newer, but fairly cheap Macs that will be easier to update and upgrade?

You could save yourself a lot of issues and frustration in the end.

Finding older OS versions to run on this Mac could get very expensive as the OS versions you may need are very old and no longer readily available.

Archived - Older Apple software downloads

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA48312?viewlocale=en_US.

Would any of this help the OP?

OK, thanks for the info.

I still have this model ( not active) still laying around.

How far do you want to go?

I'll suggest the max upgrades you can do to this Mac.

If you want to get the absolute most out of this Mac, these Macs had removable, upgradeable CPU ZIF cards.

Search eBay to see if there are any of these available for the old G3.

A company called Sonnet Technologies offered ZIF upgrades for the G3 such as G3 500 MHz ZIF cards, 1 Ghz ZIF card as well as a G4 1 Ghz ZIF card upgrade.

If you want to ry and install OS X, on these old machines, OS X had to fit on the first 8 GBs of the main drive.

A 6 GB drive won't leave a lot of left over room aftef installing OS X.

I believe your Mac can take up to any internal EIDE drive size under 128 GBs in size.

You can still by this size of drive new. You would need to create an OS X partition that is slightly under 8 GBs in size as a boot partition for OS X. The other partition/s can be what you want them to be.

You can also improve the Macs video card.

If you want to improve this Mac's video, again turn to eBay. Look for the Original ATI Radeon Mac Edition card.

No ATI number. This was considered the best and fastest card for that series Mac.

There was another card, The ATI Radeon 7200 Mac Edition card. This card while have more VRAM, was considered a slower video card. It does work, though in this model Mac.

Another thing you can add to the PCI slots, USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 cards.

I used cards from a company called Adaptec.

Adaptec made combo USB 2.0/FireWire Combo PCI card or seperate PCI cards for both USB 2.0 and FW.

Again, eBay is your friend.

Another PCI card that would be handy. You can have faster Ethernet by installing a PCI 10/100 Ethernet card into this ole' gem.

If you can find full retail versions of OS X 10.2 Jaguar and/or OS X 10.3 Panther, you can have OS X up and running on this Mac and have a capable Mac up and running with the Internet with some success.

Here's a link to OS X 10.3 Panther on CD

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0000E6NK9/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&conditi on=new

http://store.fastmac.com/product_info.php?cPath=10_5_7&products_id=202

Here is a link for OS X 10.2 Jaguar on CD

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00006F7S2/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condit ion=used

Here's another link to the ATI video card you can upgrade to

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00005QVMC/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condit ion=used

This will give you an idea of just how far upgrading this Mac you could go.

Amazon and eBay are your friend.

Sorry, you can't without the Discs/Disks.

BD's right.

No way to erase the HD without any type of system disc.

You either need OS 8, 9 Disk Utility or the OS X version to wipe the drive clean.

Good Luck and hope you have a good time getting this Mac as up to date as is possible.

My old PowerMac G3 Desktop, has in it much of what I mentioned in this post.

This Mac was, actually in operation 3 years ago or so.

I let a friend use it for about a year or so.

For most things, except online Flash-based games and some streaming video issues, it worked pretty well on the Internet and as a stand alone Mac.

Something I forgot to mention, if this Mac has not been used in a long time, you'll need to replace the G3's internal half-height AA PRAM battery.

Here's a place for a replacement

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/BAA36VPRAM/

Also forgot to mention that your G3 can take up 768 MBs of RAM.

Memory Slots 3 - PC66 3.3v, unbuffered, 8-byte, x64 non-parity 168-pin SDRAM (Low Profile)

If you can't find PC66 memory sticks, PC100 or PC133 sticks with the rest of the above specs will also work in these Macs.

Found some here

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/100SD256168/

Also, forgot, if your G3 can increase the VRAM by adding an additional or replacing with a 4 MB VRAM card giving your G3 6 MB s of VRAM Max.

Here's that stick here, too!

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/G3VRAM4/

I think I just about covered everything.

You referred to your G3 as "this beautiful machine" and indicated that it's running OS 8.5.1, has a G3-300 MHz processor, and a 6 GB hard drive. Is your G3 a Blue & White mini-tower (as shown here) or is it a low-profile, beige desktop model (as shown here)? If it's a Blue & White model, MichelPM's responses will need to be modified, as they were tailored to a beige G3 model. A Blue & White model has a different motherboard than the beige, so some of what applies to one doesn't apply to the other.

OOOhhhh,

I completely forgot about the B&W G3.

The beige models came a 300 MHz model, too!

Yeah, the only things that will change is that you won't be able to use the VRAM card and perhaps, won't need the Ethernet card, either.

I believe there were CPU upgrades for the B&W, too. Check eBay and Amazon.

This make of Mac can, I believe, take up to 1 GB of RAM

Installing OS X is a little different on a B&W model.

If this is the case, I gets a little more complicated.

In order to run OS X you will need to find retail OS 9.2 disk and install OS 9.2. Once installed , you'll need to run a special firmware updater from OS 9.2

This firmware update will allow your B&W to run OS X.

I am not sure if you can even find this and download it from Apple's website any longer.

I tried a link I had and I came up empty.

Someone else maybe able to help get this updater

You can't install or run OS X without this.

And it must be run through OS 9.2 OS.

I you get through this hurdle. You can find, purchase and install OS X 10.4 Tiger. This is the last version of OS X your B&W will run.

I am not sure if your B&W Mac has the ability to read DVD's

You need to check this .

OS 10.4 Tiger is common to find on DVD, but is harder and more expensive to find on CD's

You have the first revision of the B&W G3s, in terms of the motherboard. One of the advantages over a beige G3 is the faster system bus speed - 100 MHz compared to 66 MHz. This means that you can't use PC-66 SDRAM to increase the memory, but only PC-100 or compatible PC-133 SDRAM. Additionally, there are (4) memory slots, which gives you a maximum supported total of 1 GB of memory, when using a 256 MB SDRAM DIMM in each of them. High-density memory chips (256-Megabit chips) aren't supported, meaning that a supported 256 MB SDRAM DIMM must have (16) chips on the card, with (8) on each side. Your B&W shipped with a 6 GB hard drive. Because the original IDE controller can't reliably support a hard drive that's much larger than 20 GBs, those of us who wanted to install larger capacity hard drives in our Revision 1 B&Ws had to install a Mac-compatible Ultra ATA-100 or Ultra ATA-133 PCI controller card. As was used in the beige G3 series, the B&Ws used a "ZIF" (Zero Insertion Force) type G3 processor, and - some years ago - there were a variety of third-party G3 or G4 processor upgrades. Most have been discontinued, due to declining demand. Does your B&W G3 have a 32x CD-ROM drive or the optional DVD-ROM drive? If it has the latter, that would simplify your search for an OS 10.4 (Tiger) retail/universal installer disk. Fortunately for you, the "B&W G3 Firmware 1.1 Update" can be run on OS 8.5.1 - 9.x.x. You can read about it here and download it. As far as the graphics card goes, you have the ATI Rage 128 PCI card with 16 MBs of SGRAM. It's old and barely adequate, by today's standards. I replaced that card with the slightly newer Radeon 7000 in a pair of my B&Ws, but that's still an 11 year-old card now. The bottom line is that you'll end up spending a lot more $$ to upgrade that 13 year-old computer to run Panther or Tiger, than the computer is worth. Even though capable of running Panther or Tiger with the hardware upgrades of a larger hard drive, more memory, a faster/better graphics card, and possibly a DVD±RW drive, the computer is limited in terms of speed/performance by the dated architecture of its motherboard and components. It can't compare to the responsiveness of your newer Macs. If you keep that in mind (and money is no object), it can be an enjoyable project. Those of us who upgraded older Macs have learned that we could never hope to recover the money spent, even if we were to sell the computer a day later.

Well done Jeff,

Yeah, many of us PowerMac users spent a lot of time and money to keep our aging Macs running as long as possible.

Knowing we would never get that money back if we decided to sell these Macs later on.

That's what I was trying to get across to the OP. That it maybe better to find a used, but much newer, Mac to upgrade as the old G3 models will cost some, especially now, to update and the performance returns, in today's computing world, won't be stellar and, maybe, less the mediocre.

Jscheerer,

If you have the cash, tenacity, and patience, everything you want to do with this Mac can be done.

The question you need to ask yourself is whether the cash and effort is really worth spending on a nearly 14 year old Mac.

I had a 2003 G4 MDD for nearly 10 years. After, many hardware upgrades, I finally had to bite the bullet and purchase a newer Mac.

Yeah, I know and understand you have this Mac laying around, but, maybe the money and time can be better spent, elsewhere.

Especially, if this Mac isn't going to be your everyday use Mac?

It's up to you. Good luck if choose to accept this assignment!

:)