I was clearing out a cupboard in the school I work in and I found an iMac. The Head said I could have it (along with a trumpet!) so I took it home. It works, or at least appears to.
It runs Mac OS 8.6, and has various educational programs installed on it.
The thing is, I can’t figure out how to do anything on it. Or get it to tell me anything about itself - hard disk size, amount of ram, etc.
I thought it had a DVD player in it but it couldn’t read the DVD I put in it so I guess it’s just a CD player.
I have never used an iMac or Mac of any type before, only having one mouse button is weird!
My questions are: can this thing be used for anything useful, or is it too old and slow by todays standards? Could it be loaded up with video and music and used as a media player? Could windows run on it? Or linux or summat? Or perhaps used for the internet in another room? Or should I just throw it out?
Hopefully someone can tell me what this thing will / can do.
Mac OS 8.6 is very old, no wonder you got it for free. I’ve used a mac with os9 for several months. It was a friend’s old computer. There’s still lots of software that will work on this machine, but very few you actually want to use. You should compare this to win95.
Unfortunately, I can’t teach you how to use it, 'cause it’s more than a year ago I used such a mac, maybe someone else here…
PS: if you want a mac, go for OS X, it’s a totally new operating system compared to os 8-9.
edit: you can use it for a CD or mp3 player, video may be a little slow, internet explorer 5 may work but also rather slow. You can’t install windows on this machine. Linux will work, but only with some ugly hacks. (I remember an old yellowdog linux distro used to work.)
My brother got one of these out of the trash. It’s probably pretty useless unless you’re a geek and want it for cool stuff… we use ours for lanning in aoe2 which is ridiculous but runs on it. You could try putting osx on it, it worked on ours, but I think ours is a newer edition.
Also, lots of places recycle computers, or take them and use them for a good cause. If you’re in a semi-metro area you could find one of those.
If you click on the apple at the top, or one of the windows up there, you might be able to find something that says “About this Mac”, that’ll tell you the system specs. If it has less than 128M of RAM, don’t bother with OSX, but if you can upgrade it to say 320M, it’ll run both OSX and Linux (Ubuntu Linux has PowerPC versions, they may have discontinued it with Feisty Fawn (Version 7)) pretty damn well. I have an old ibook Clamshell, only 300mhz, 6G drive, but with 320M of RAM it’s fast enough for almost anything. I used to type essays on it 'cause the keyboard was so nice, and once OpenOffice loaded (old harddrive means slow harddrive) OpenOffice ran just as fast as on my 1.2Ghz laptop and my 2.4Ghz Pentium4.
Yeah, that’s quite an antique in computer standards, even for being a Mac. Mac’s tend to take a while longer to be antiquated. Yeah, it’s probably only worth about $50. If you have the OS install disks I would re-install it, as schools are a prime place for computers to get messed up with allot of kids tinkering with files that shouldn’t be messed with.
