[G4] Upgrade of old G4/400Mhz/OS X-Jaguar?

[Richard Klein]

On 9/2/07, Fast Primes <fast_primes at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I'm a Windows XP user that just got an old Mac with the following specs:
>
>      -     400Mhz processor
>      -     running OS X 10.2/Jaguar?
>      -     384 meg ram--expandable to 1.5 gig via 4 slots of PC100 SDRAM
> mem.

With 4 slots, I think you have the "Gigabit Ethernet" model, in which
case you can actually expand it to 2GB of memory, but you'd need to
upgrade to OS X 10.4/Tiger.  Jaguar could only handle up to 1.5GB.

>      -     10 gig drive--7 gig free
>
> The machine seems to work fairly well--however it's frozen up on occasion,
> sometimes with the revolving "beach ball". Is this because of memory
> constraints or should I upgrade the OS to 10.3 or 10.4?

I don't know why it's freezing.  If it were me, I'd upgrade to 10.4
(for various reasons), but they may do nothing for the freezing issue.
 Also note that Apple will probably release the next version of OS X
(Leopard) within the next few months.  I don't know how well or poorly
that might run on our old G4s, though.

> Can the processor be upgraded to a faster one via some third party solution?
> Are new Intel CPU boards available?

You have several options to upgrade to faster (or even dual) G4
processors, but there's no way to upgrade to an Intel processor.  You
can find a lot of the upgrade options here:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/accelerators/
That's not the only place to get them, but they've been around for a
while, seem to be respected in the G4 community, and I've liked my
dealings with them.  They even have good prices once in a while.  :)

> How do I connect to an Windows NTFS formatted USB external drive and read
> files off it?

I'm not positive, but you may be out of luck.  NTFS is a proprietary
Microsoft filesystem.  In the future, if you want to use an external
drive on both Macs and PCs, you'll want to format the drive with FAT
or FAT32.

I know that in Linux it is possible to mount NTFS drives and read
them, and there are experimental modules that allow writing to the
drives, too...in some cases.  But that doesn't always work, it
requires some technical knowledge, and that's Linux, not Mac.  Maybe
someone else will have better information for you, but I think it's
unlikely.

-- 
Rich