it…out

While driving by Mac Pros a few weeks ago, Lindsey noticed that their sign said “free older Macs today.” Knowing that when it comes to free old computers I am hard to contain, Lindsey pulled over and I checked out the store. It turned out they were giving away a bunch of old G3 desktop machines with OS9 as part of their “adopt a mac” program. I asked the guys in the store if their sign meant I could get a free Apple mouse for my old Mac SE/30 at home (it’s been mouseless for about 3 years now…), and they said I could if I took a G3 to go with it. And so began the great G3 experiment.

First experiences
While this was my third mac in as many years (I picked up the SE/30 and an LC/II a while back), I have never really used a Mac since junior high, and even this G3 isn’t that old. Things have definitely changed since the days of System 7, and while OS9 is no new kid on the block, it still provides a very enjoyable interface. I never gave Mac OS much credence before OSX debuted, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to use. I feared setting up an Internet connection on a machine that old would be problematic, but I was wrong. I hooked up an old 15″ Packard Bell monitor via a display adapter I had lying around and plugged in an Ethernet cable. I half expected an animated juggling clown to appear and tell me I was ready to surf the information superhighway, but no such performance was provided. I launched IE 5 and started to surf — just long enough to find out that IE 5 for mac really really sucks, which as you might have guessed isn’t very long at all. Luckily there are alternatives…

Move over bacon, here comes Mozilla…(ca 2002)
As far as I can tell the newest free browser I can run on this thing is Moz 1.2, which isn’t great, but given the choice of that or IE5, I’ll take Moz. There’s also the not-entirely-free but more up-to-date icab, which is quicker to launch but just as slow to render.

Fifth time’s a charm
Things were going very smoothly, and then all of a sudden the G3 refused to boot. It would hang at boot with the progress bar stuck around 15%. After some fiddling it seems as though it will only boot about every fifth time, so I’ve just been leaving it on most of the time. Maybe I’ll reinstall OS9 once I figure out how to.

We can rebuild him!
I had always read that the macs were fun machines to take apart — that they were designed to be easily serviced. It was actually kind of fun to take the case off the G3 and see what was inside. Through manipulating a series of levers and doors (including a “hold the hood of my car open” kind of lever complete with Apple logo), I was able to reveal the RAM and hard drive, upgrade the ram from 32MB to 96MB (I knew holding on to those old PC66 DIMMS would pay off!), and add a 10GB hard drive I had laying around. The RAM upgrade has helped tremendously — to the point where I can actually have more than one app open at once.

iTunes 2.0, hold the sound
The guys at Mac Pros were nice enough to install iTunes (albeit version 2.0 which doesn’t support the music store or shared music, but it’s the newest version this machine will support). It turns out my mac has an even bigger problem: the OS can’t seem to detect the sound “card”. There is a sound output jack, and it’s connected to a soundcard/modem-looking device, but the system Profiler(?) doesn’t detect any sound hardware, but then again I don’t even know if it’s supposed to.

Update:
I’m not sure how I decided that the problem with this machine was the modem “daughter card” attached to the sound card, but it was. I removed the modem and now the G3 boots every time, the sound card is detected, and iTunes has become much more useful. I was also able to get the installed RAM up to 224MB by digging up some old chips. I also replaced the incredibly loud 6GB hard drive with a new, ultra-quiet 40GB 7200RPM drive. The system is now much faster and much quieter. I also found some OS9 updates on Apple’s website and have the system running OS 9.2.2, which I think is the newest OS9 out there (though still very old ).

Where to now?
I discovered that this G3 is actually upgradable to a G4, capable of running the hallowed OSX. Do I dare break my “spend no money on thy Mac” rule?