What To Do With An OLD iMac

I know a lot of people with one of those old “flavored” iMacs sitting around. I even have one myself. But what to do with it? Not so long ago the HD on it died and I got a bigger one and more RAM installed which brought the whole machine back to life. Bob Levitus gives the same advice in the Houston Chronicle:

In the end, I recommended keeping the iMac, but adding a bigger hard drive and more RAM. I speculated that upgrading to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther might offer additional speed, but wasn’t as important as the RAM and disk.

It worked. After backing up their 10-GB drive, I installed a 512-MB RAM chip ($139), and a 120-GB hard disk ($100), and I’ll be darned if the thing didn’t run a whole lot faster.

The RAM upgrade required no tools and took less than five minutes. Installing an internal hard drive isn’t quite so simple and will void your warranty, so while an external FireWire hard disk will cost a bit more, it’s a better solution. For those of you who insist on doing it yourself, upgrading the internal hard drive took a screwdriver and about 30 minutes, working from instructions I found on the Internet.

My point today is that adding RAM or an external hard disk to most Macs is a piece of cake. For less than $250 my friends now have a smooth-running iMac that will serve them for many years to come.

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I know a lot of people with one of those old “flavored” iMacs sitting around. I even have one myself. But what to do with it?...

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Lee-Anne

Does anyone know where to get the 120 GB HD (online) that is mentioned in the article? Thanks!

January 03 2005 at 8:31 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

PC Guy

It took you over three years to figure out that a computer can be upgraded?

December 01 2004 at 9:40 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jeff Thomas

I have an old iMac bought when they first came out. I want to sell it along with an iDock and all the goodies that came with it. What would be a reasonable asking price? It has OS 8 on it.

June 29 2004 at 10:50 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

rett

I've using an old 333mhz iMac as a the main router for my home LAN using 10.2.8 with the help of a nifty little script from macosxhints that that activates net sharing at start-up. It's wortked like a charm. I'm also running a number of the built-in services like web sharing and samba and I'm running itunes to share music with the other computers in the house. I tried using 10.3 server for a bit, and it's pretty damn cool. I had a much easier time fi nding articles online about setting up a 10.2 box as a server. O'Reilly has a great series of articles on setting up apache and even installing php on 10.2. Here's the url for the o-reilly articles http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/04/04/apache_jaguar_pt1.html . Oh, and I should mention that I upgraded the iMac to 512mb ram and threw in a 27gb hard drive (don't forget to make a

May 25 2004 at 6:36 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Will

My friend gave me an older generation iMac that had OS X 10.1 or 2 with ram upgrades and I was really surprised at how smoothly it ran.

May 22 2004 at 12:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

mrjerz

I have looked everywhere for a really easy way to set this up, but i there a good site that you guys know of that details how to turn one of these things into a server running PHP? I am having a really hard time trying to figure it out, and would love to do it with my iMac.

May 22 2004 at 12:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply