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

[Eric Wood]

400 MHz sounds like an old G3 system to me, or an original G4 tower.

Issue number one is freezing. It's possible that a new system could  
help stability, but if there's a bit of bad hardware or a bad PRAM or  
NVRAM setting causing it, it probably won't make a difference. I'd  
upgrade just for the sake of modern compatibility - Tiger is no  
slower than Jaguar on such a system - I have an iMac 400 MHz or so  
(DV) that runs Tiger nicely. It's using 512 MB of RAM.

I'd replace that tiny hard drive and just install a newer system at  
that time. You could leave the old drive in there and let OS X  
transfer documents and settings from it during the installation. If  
the freezing continues afterwards, try popping one of the RAM modules  
out and run the system for a while. If you can get it to stop  
freezing that way, you've likely identified a bad module that's  
easily replaced.

As for reading NTFS, there is a freeware NTFS driver available on  
www.versiontracker.com. Just search for NTFS and it'll come up. After  
that's installed, just plug 'n play.

If you really want an Intel in there, you could stick a PC board in  
the Mac case >:) But you'd only get to run Mac OS with some hacked  
edition that likely won't even work, so no, you'll be using PPC.  
Other World Computing sells a lot of Mac PPC upgrades -  
unfortunately, there seems to be no store in existence that lets you  
pick one off of a shelf.

I'm quite surprised to see it's got 4 RAM slots but a maximum of 1.5  
GBs. That doesn't add up. My own G4 claims to have four RAM slots in  
system profiler, but only has three physical slots, and it is limited  
to 1.5 GBs for that reason.

Eric


Am 02.09.2007 um 11:12 schrieb Fast Primes:

> 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.
>     -     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?
>
> Can the processor be upgraded to a faster one via some third party  
> solution? Are new Intel CPU boards available?
>
> How do I connect to an Windows NTFS formatted USB external drive  
> and read files off it?
>
> Thanks!
>
> FP--books "Missing Manual", "Mac OS X Unleashed" and Robin's iMac  
> Apps book are inbound from amazon.
>
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