Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Dead iMac

In the last post, I showed you a picture of the trackball mouse we gave to Mrs. Wayman for her computer. In that picture was the older strawberry iMac G3 333MHz, 160 mg, 6gig Hard Drive computer. I was trying to see if it would update to Xubuntu 6.10. The CD upgrade process was taking far too long. I tried to upgrade online, but no go -same as the first time I tried. When I tried to reinstall Xubuntu 6.06.1 with the alternate install CD, once again; no go. After taking it apart, re-examining the parts, putting it back together, same result. Conclusion; as I'd suspected a while ago, the CD tray was no longer working.

The older iMacs are interesting creatures. They're basically iBooks with a CRT monitor built in. Actually, this was a pretty smart business move on Apple's part at the time. Why use too many different parts? Just make the outside parts different. The older iMacs are basically the same parts as the laptops. That's how they fit all that stuff in there.

I don't intend on trashing this computer. I may have to trash the insides, but I think it could have some new life, eventually. I think I'd like to do something like iPC modification on MacMod.com. I could use an LCD screen, from an older laptop -when I find one, that is. Soop it up really good. With older parts, of course. I might even use that new plastic paint, and paint it black. Maybe brown, or even blue.

We still have one other working iMac G3 with Xubuntu, so that much isn't lost. It's fun getting those little beasts working again. OS X is just way too slow on them, but Xubuntu spins right along.

So, the strawberry iMac G3 may get reincarnated, someday.

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