Paul wrote:
> What happened was that I acquired a bunch of semi-working slot loading
> iMacs for about $5 each. They all have Firewire. Since they all power
> up showing the blinking "?", I assume the motherboards are good.
I think that means there is no OS, which is not unusual for a used
machine that has had its HD wiped clean. The kiss of death would be
the "sad mac". Do they "bong" during the initial self-test (within the
first second or two after power on)? If so, it passed the hardware
test by the firmware.
> One
> or two have 600 MHz IBM processors. (I pulled one from a machine with
> a cracked case and weak video, so I saw the IBM markings.) Others are
> 500 MHz. Some have cracked cases, most seem to have failed optical
> drives, some have weak video. What I'd like to do is combine them into
> one or two working machines with the best video, CPU, and optical
> drives.
Hmmmm....
I would recommend putting your effort into the 600Mhz machine if it
was a working PSU and CRT. All you would need to do is put in the best
HD you have, add as much RAM as you can, and find a working optical
drive. The last one is a judgement call. You have your choice between
CDRW and DVD. Personally, I would go with DVD, and run CDRW externally
via FireWire. Or, you could do a combo drive, but that's a costly
route.
The 500s could be one of three generations. One of which only has 8mb
video and a 750 processor, like my Mac, The others have 750CX(e)s and
16mb video.
>
> I think the main obstacle is going to be having enough working optical
> drives. I think I only have one good one, and it's an odd drive that's
> not compatible with a tower or a laptop machine.
>
Use that.
> What I'll probably end up doing is selling off almost all of this, and
> going back to my usual Pismos and G4 towers. Then I won't have to deal
> with evil embedded CRT's. With what's on hand, I may be able to make
> one good machine. But after all that, even though it will have a combo
> optical drive, I don't think it will be able to read DVD+R's.
I dunno if the Apple DVD drives could read DVD-Rs or not. The combos
are different AFAIK, because Apple never officially put combos in
their G3 iMacs.
Also, for what you paid for these machines, you could easily make your
money back (and then some) parting them out. Like, for instance, I'd
love to find a working optical drive that's better than my 24x CD. But
I would certainly try to get at least one of them working just for the
fun of it. An old G3 iMac is still useful for many tasks.
- John
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