PowerPC 5500/275, Apple Video Player and OS X

How much memory is installed in your 5500 and how much free space is available on the hard drive? Have you ever used a third-party disk optimizing utility (like Norton's "Speed Disk") to defragment the hard drive, to create contiguous free space? If the hard drive's available storage capacity is scattered about the platter, it's not ideal for recording video. Having adequate system memory (not "virtual memory"), so that a larger amount of memory can be allocated for the Apple Video Player program itself, would undoubtedly help. The 5500 has a limit of 128 MBs for installed memory, using a pair of 64 MB 5-volt EDO 168-pin DIMMs (1K or 2K refresh rate). If you have 64 MBs or less, you would benefit by installing additional memory. Depending on the current amount and configuration of the installed memory, this might involve removing one of the existing memory DIMMs, to install a larger one in its place. If your original 5500 Restore Disk includes OS 8.0, you should download and run the OS 8.1 Update. If OS 8 serves your needs, then there probably isn't a need to invest in a slightly newer OS, such as 8.5.1 or 8.6. OS X isn't supported on the 5500s, and "XPostFacto" (a third-party helper program for installing OS X on unsupported legacy Macs) has yet to support the 5500s. In all likelihood, it never will, given its increasing age and inherent hardware limitations.

Hi,

I used to have a 5500/250 and Video Card.. I seem to recall it crashed like that if you were using Virtual Memory, and the fix was to use RAM Doubler instead? Or maybe it was the other way around.

Sorry I can't be more precise, it's been about 9 years..

I have a Performa 6320 of approximately the same vintage running OS 8.1. It never recorded video extremely well and was almost always very jerky. It did screen captures of the TV extremely well, however. I had plenty of disk space (20GB) and maxed the RAM at 64K.
However, capturing video did not usually cause a freeze. Also, playback from a video camera worked fine.


I would not try OS X on your machine; even getting OS X to work on a PM9600 with a G4 card I found problematical to the point of abandoning the attempt.

I found OS 8.0 to be fine but the BIG advantage of 8.1 is that it was the first MacOS to support the HFS+ hard drive formatting, which reduced the minimal file size for the HFS's something-like-64K to the HFS+'s something like 4K or 8K, which means a lot more efficient use of your hard drive's storage space. As far as RAM demanded by the operating system, going from 8.0 to 8.1 did increase it from something like around 9MB to something like 16MB minimaly. That is not too bad, provided one has at least 32MB or more RAM.


Basically, your issue is economic: the 5500 is now so old and there have been so many technical improvements in speed, storage, bus design, etc., that it really doesn't make good economic sense to put any significant amount of money into these old machines, except just as a hobby where cost isn't counted. Better to put your money into a newer Mac, especially since the MacMini's are so economical and such great little computers.



PM9600/233 (OS 8.6;9.1); G3 white iBook (OS X 10.4.8); G4 MacMini (10.4.8) Performa 6320 (OS 8.1); MacPlus (OS 6.0.8)