9 replies to this topic

[Roco]

Roco's got him self an I book G4 ? ,  a freebie and low mileage ,
my first ever chance to play with a mac , result = totally lost , (I spent an hour trying to find the delete key ),
unfortunately no book or disks , the only real problem is it's slow on the web 235Kbps as opposed to my pc
running at 5Mbps , ( both hard wired into my router )
any suggestions ? , I have been looking for tune up apps . like Ccleaner for mac's ,
and does it have a defrag application ? does it need one ? , total noob on this ,

any advice appreciated ,

[CA3LE]

Holy Cow... an iBook?  Do you have a time machine or something?  

What version of Mac OS is it running?  More specs please...

You may want to check out what Wikipedia has on the subject...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook ... ALLOT of detailed info on the iBook G4.

[tommie gorman]

The best fresh start as always is a reformat if possible. I know you knew that.  <grins>

[mudmanc4]

Not really the best thing with OS X to reformat or as windows would be. Especially since he does not have any disks , each apple version has it's own flavor of OS , specific to the machine and only the version of the machine , they will not even install on another.

Roco if you MUST wipe the OS for some unknown reason, if I can get the model, I have almost all of the iBook disks left over from past machines that no longer exist. And many other factory disk sets. Although I believe we can deal with it w/o having to re image.

[Roco]

Time machine ? ,I still got one foot in the 60's, the 90's was only yesterday , ( my car is 37 years old )

the iBook ,"white ibook " a G3 dual usb, with dvd r/w, 600Mhz + maxed out with ram , running Tiger 1.4.11,
got the 1.4.11 update from Apple , ran that and it seems to have cured the little niggles ,

but I am still on a steep learning curve ( google is my friend ) ,
as every thing seems to be working OK , I have decided to buy a new battery ($22 USD ) as the original is totally dead ,
well it was a freebie and heading for the trash can ,
( not sure if this is funny or a personal insult ? , the owner emigrated to Australia in 2008 , last week his mom decided to decorate his old bedroom , , phoned son about his stored stuff ,(the iBook etc)  he said dump it all ,
as she said the first person I thought of was Roco , ,)
anyway great chance for me  to play with a Mac , it's kinda growing on me , if the battery works out OK , I shall be keeping it ,
future plans is to install an airport ,($20 s/h )  as it's using a Asus usb dongle at the moment ,

great learning curve , but no doubt I will be back saying help ,
BTW I got the admin name and password ,my future use =light web surfing and pop e-mail , just added Bean word proc,
as it's a light Win style word .

thanks again guys for the help,

[Roco]

Just an update on the Mac g3 tiger iBook , got a new replacement battery , now working great , ( I had been looking for the cmos battery LOL )
next move is a s/h airport to replace the usb1 dongle ,
how fast is it , ?, my only interest is internet , it's about 10% slower than my 4 core windows desktop in speed tests,
total cost so far $25 , another $25 for the airport,  $50 for a new learning curve ,kinda hard to beat I guess,

[mudmanc4]

I'm waiting to hear how your finding everything. As well as if your using it regular yet.

And honestly , imo if you put 150 US into the iBook , and no physical issues , you got one great deal. Those things are work horses. The ONLY (other then that cranky nvidia gpu issue) issue I ever had with PPC is the same thing w/ newer apple machines , if your running a bunch of programs at once , and being very productive , and don't restart for a couple weeks, some of the memory for some reason doesn't get re allocated back to usable. And you'll see a slow down. A restart fixes it in a jiffy.

There are better terms to explain it , but thats good enough lol

[Roco]

mudmanc4, on 15 December 2011 - 10:12 PM, said:

I'm waiting to hear how your finding everything. As well as if your using it regular yet.

And honestly , imo if you put 150 US into the iBook , and no physical issues , you got one great deal. Those things are work horses. The ONLY (other then that cranky nvidia gpu issue) issue I ever had with PPC is the same thing w/ newer apple machines , if your running a bunch of programs at once , and being very productive , and don't restart for a couple weeks, some of the memory for some reason doesn't get re allocated back to usable. And you'll see a slow down. A restart fixes it in a jiffy.

There are better terms to explain it , but thats good enough lol

mudmanc4, on 15 December 2011 - 10:12 PM, said:

I'm waiting to hear how your finding everything. As well as if your using it regular yet.

And honestly , imo if you put 150 US into the iBook , and no physical issues , you got one great deal. Those things are work horses. The ONLY (other then that cranky nvidia gpu issue) issue I ever had with PPC is the same thing w/ newer apple machines , if your running a bunch of programs at once , and being very productive , and don't restart for a couple weeks, some of the memory for some reason doesn't get re allocated back to usable. And you'll see a slow down. A restart fixes it in a jiffy.

There are better terms to explain it , but thats good enough lol

Thanks mudmanc4 for asking , the Ibook g3 is doing ok ,  I use it most days as I am cycling the new battery ,
runs about 4.20 hours at the moment ,using it for on line radio ,BBC world news etc ,

the Mac system ? , apart from right click  looks good to me ,  but not a Mac problem it applies to all lap/note books
but the track pad works well , better than dell windows laptops ,
the problem is solely mine ,(bit of a knuckle dragger ) spent most of my windows time using a track ball mouse .
only recently got used to using a mouse ,
would I buy a Mac computer ? , yes, but the UK price is against it , the Apple 11 inch mac book air is $1,358.+
http://store.apple.c...macbook_air    
BTW waiting for the airport card , expected delivery 19 Dec, by Royal Mail , well it is the silly season ,
and the Postie is under paid and over worked at the moment , under paid ? try riding a delivery bicycle
in London city,   evil knieval had a better life expectancy ,

[mudmanc4]

Quote

try riding a delivery bicycle
in London city, evil knieval had a better life expectancy ,

If you have not figured it out yet , the right click contextual menu on the G3 should be { two fingers on trackpad + click }  maybe just one finger ,I know it's two on the macbook pro.

Here , check this program out, or this second version  you should be able to set a few things to your liking on the trackpad.

[Pgoodwin1]

Hi Roco. You've probably figured it out by now that the Internet speed on the G3 iBook won't be the cause of your pain. That comes when it's rendering pages out of all that data. I finally retired my 2002  800 MHz G4 Flat Panel iMac about 14 months ago. It was still plenty fast enough to do email, but web page complexity finally killed it. Plus the grand kids kept hounding me that my computer was too slow to do their Club Penguin. LOL  But I got 8 great years out of it. Heck the 1998 Bondi Blue G3 iMac still works, and so does my wife's 1994 PowerBook 540c.

Now I have a pretty quick late 2010 iMac, and it seems that the only thing slowing it down is cinci.rr.com. traffic loads. Late at night they have pretty good throughput but afternoons and evenings it's up and down.