Upgrading my Imac 233 ghz

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Daiana

Registered
Hey guys,

I have one of the original Bondi Blue Imac's bought it brand new in 98 passed it along to my mom for the last 2.5 years and I just got it back and would love to upgrade everything and anything on it. I wanna know what my options are I have been out of the Mac loop for toooooooooo long and wanna get my mac back in order, I would love input on harddrive, ram, cd rom, and of course OS X :) Right now I am running 9.1 on it right now.

Thanks everyone looking forward to getting into the loop again!
Daiana
 
I wouldn't bother upgrading unless you are doing it for fun and don't mind wasting money. The reason I say that is, this machine is fine as is, but not worth the money to upgrade.

Having said that, if still interested, stick with maxxing out RAM, upgrading the Hard Drive and installing OSX.

It will support up through OSX 10.3.9 normally and if you use XpostFacto 4 you may be able to get Tiger installed. If you put in a hard drive larger than 8 GB, you MUST partition it and OSX MUST be installed completely within the first 8GB or OSX won't run.

The max supported RAM is 384 MB (a 256 MB stick in the top slot and a 128 MB stick in the bottom slot, though some people have gotten a 256 MB to work in the bottom slot as well to reach 512 MB, but this is unsupported and may not work for you).

Non-Apple upgrade parts may cause a problem when trying to install OSX so stick with hard drive brands and memory that are guaranteed to work in a Mac. Be sure to have no USB peripherals connected during the OSX install.
 
Wow Great input you pretty much answered it all, to be honest I have a labtop so this imac upgrade is just for home use and internet use I don't mind putting in some money because after all its the first computer i bought and I love it it works fine just runs a little slow so i wanna give it an extra boost. Tech support said if I install os x it will run too slow?
D
 
It won't be as snappy as OS 9 is that is for sure. I have OS X 10.3.9 installed on my 300 MHz Clamshell Rev A iBook and it performs faster than I expected, but then again I expected it to be very slow. It is actually sluggish, but acceptable. Then again, you are running at 233 MHz so it will even be slower than mine. You'll have to judge for yourself if getting the OSX extras is worth the slower than OS 9 speed you'll be getting.
 
Normally there is the 8 gig limit on the boot partition as previously mentioned but even though the machine will support X.3.9 I would still recommend to put in XPostFacto since as of v4 of XPF they have gotten around that 8 gig limit so you can have only one partition, which is very nice. Really the only two things I think are worth upgrading are the ram and the harddrive. the ram in these maxes out at 256mb (2x128mb chips). You can put more in it than that, but you have to be VERY VERY specific with the ram that is chosen to do so, due to physical construction of the chips. The harddrive you can always pull out and put in your next machine so I don't really think that is a waste of money at all. However, this machine will not use larger then 120gig drive, so larger IS a waste of money. I would also recommend a 7200 rpm drive over a 5400 rpm drive. I have used both in these machines and I could notice a small difference, but on these, any little bit helps. One of my imacs of this generation has the Sonnet G3/600mhz upgrade that also added fireware to the machine. It helps out definately and I am not really sorry I bought it, even though i felt it was overpriced, but if i had it to do over again, I probibly would NOT buy it again.

EDIT: oh yeah, another pretty cheap upgrade you can do if this is the 233 model is to install the extra 4mb of video memory if you don't already have it. the chip looks very similar to the ram chips, but is different. the ram chips are on the top and bottom of the processor card. the vram chip is off to the side on the motherboard. check in the ASP to see if you have 2mb or 6mb of vram. about a year ago i found some of these chips on ebay for like 8 bucks including shipping. it may not really speed up the machine, but it will let you get millions of colors at 1024x768.
 
Wow guys thanks for the input I did find out last night I have a 6 mb card for video because when I bought it in the mac store they had already upgraded it, it was their instore demo for a few months. As well it has 192 ram in it so not sure how to handle that situation yet. I did here about the processor upgrade and I am debatting it because unfortunately I only have dial up at home and since I will use this computer for emails and my future ipod and pictures from my digital there isn't a whole lot. i would also like to get a burner in there and I am a little confused on the different types of cd trays?

Daiana
 
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