Friday, April 18, 2003
The Jaguar Experience on an original iMac
In response to my "Macintosh users, you've never had it so good" column, Todd Betterley writes in:
"Wow, did I do a double take when I read about your epiphany over doing all the great stuff in OS X, but on a '5 year old machine'. That's because my mac at home is that same model, the original revision A bondi iMac (233 Mhz/tray loading CD). But I'm still running OS 9 on that machine and waiting until I can scrape the bucks together to get a new PowerBook, because I was under the impression that you couldn't run OS X on a Rev-A Bondi iMac. Did you do any upgrading to it to be able to run Jaguar? Any info would be greatly appreciated."
Well Todd, MacOS X certainly runs on the original iMac, but it runs with the kinds of limitations you'd expect from a five year old computer. I'll lay out the upgrade process, the limitations, and the best ways for making the most of what you've got, for you and anyone else who might be in your situation.
I've made two hardware upgrades over the years. The first was to boost the video-RAM from the original two megabytes up to six. These days, this'll cost you around five dollars, and I'd recommend it even if you're sticking with OS 9. This is something that only rev. A iMac owners need to do; starting with rev. B, Apple included the extra VRAM itself. Readers who are unsure of whether their iMac needs the extra VRAM should refer to their Apple System Profiler.
The second, vital hardware upgrade is the RAM memory. The first four revisions of the iMac came with a now-paltry 32 Megabytes, barely enough to even so much as boot up OS 9, let alone OS X. I buy my RAM from these guys but you can do your own comparison shopping here. You can boost yourself all the way up to 256 Megabytes (128 in each slot) for around forty dollars, and that's plenty of RAM to run MacOS X. Apple says that the rev. A iMac can't be upgraded past 256 MB, and my experiences have told me the same, but if anyone out there has found a way to take the rev. A any further, please let me know. The rev. B, C, and D models can officially hold up to 512 MB, which equates to more speed under OS X. And with computers this old and slow, you'll want all the speed boosts you can get.
Although I've often been tempted to rip the original four gigabyte hard drive out of my old iMac and replace it with an off-the-shelf 40 or 80 GB model, I've always ended up deciding not to. While RAM upgrades on an original iMac can be done rather harmlessly in ten minutes or less, hard drives are a whole different ballgame. First, you have the unenviable task of moving all your data from the old hard drive to the new one, then reinstalling all your apps, getting all your iLife libraries back where they belong, and so on. Secondly, although at four and a half years old there's no warranty left to void, replacing the hard drive requires taking apart quite a bit of the inside assembly, which exposes you to the possibility that your iMac might not want to boot up anymore once you put it back together. I once had to remove a hard drive from a fully vandalized iMac, and that was difficult enough, even knowing that I wasn't going to have to put the computer back together again once I was done. But for those who enjoy a challenge, Macintouch has several reader descriptions of the process. One word of caution: although I don't normally recommend partitioning your hard drive, if you upgrade your iMac to a drive larger than eight gigabytes, you must create a first partition no larger than eight gigabytes and install your OS X system on that partition. Otherwise, OS X is guaranteed not to work. The good news is that if you think you can live within the confines of the original four gigabytes, you don't have to worry about any of the above technobabble.
If you have decided to stick with your original hard drive, when installing Jaguar, choose the "Custom Install" and uncheck any foreign languages and printer drivers you know you won't need. Sure, the novelty of being able to boot your computer with menus in the Ubamban language might be tempting, but you're going to need that hard drive space for more important things -- trust me on this. By going the Jaguar route on your tiny hard drive, you're volunteering to enter a world in which you obsess over hard drive space the way you once obsessed over wall space in your college dorm room. Especially if you plan to do anything with pictures or music, you don't want to waste any of your precious four gigs on stuff you'll never use.
Installing Jaguar on your rev. A iMac from CD-ROM will take at least a few hours, much longer than the typical Jaguar install, because of the inherent slowness of the computer upon which you're installing it. Once you get Jaguar up and running, you'll want to install the 10.2.5 update immediately. It provides a modest speed boost over 10.2, and you're going to need all the speed you can get. While you're at it, download and install Safari v.73, iPhoto 2, and the AppleWorks 6.2.4 update. Run Software Update (in System Preferences) to what else you're missing in the way of security updates, etc. But be frugal here: if Software Update offers a new version of AirPort software, or iMovie 3, skip it. Your computer doesn't have AirPort or FireWire anyway, so don't waste your precious hard drive space on software you can't even use.
Once you've got your software fully updated, go to your Displays pane in System Preferences and set your colors down to "Thousands". If this sounds like a compromise, it is. It will make your screen look just a bit less perfect, but it will also boost the speed of your computer by what I might ballpark at twenty percent. If you're afraid that you might be missing something by not running at Millions of colors, check the box that places a "Displays" menu on the right-hand side of your toolbar, which allows for one-click toggling of color and resolution settings. This way, you can jump back to Millions of colors if you ever need to. You'll also notice the 800x600 and 1024x768 resolution settings. Ironically, 800x600 is the setting that makes everything larger, despite the smaller numbers. Even if you always ran your iMac in 800x600 mode under OS 9, you might consider trying 1024x768 under OS X to accommodate the larger icons and eye candy of OS X's Aqua interface. Sure, you'll have to sit a little closer to the screen, but if you can adjust to it, you'll be rewarded with the equivalent of having a larger screen.
Double-click your hard drive and take a look at the window's toolbar to see how much hard drive space is available. This will be crucial going forward. In order to keep OS X humming along, you'll need to find a way to keep at least a gigabyte (one thousand megabytes) of space empty so that OS X can use it for virtual memory. If you've already got a gigabyte or more free, you've got nothing to worry about. If you've got less free space than that, you'll need to go on a scavenger hunt looking for things that you don't need. Keep in mind that simple word processing documents take up almost no space at all, and throwing away ten thousand of them still wouldn't make a dent. The following are the kinds of offending items you're looking for, and what you choose to throw away is your business:
Applications you never use: We've all got an old 46 Megabyte demo of a game we'll never play, or an application we were sure we would use every day but haven't launched in years, buried somewhere on our hard drive. Find them and trash them.
Full-screen video files: QuickTime and RealPlayer video clips take up quite a bit of space if they last more than a few seconds or take up a large chunk of the screen. Unless it's footage of your grandchildren, you might want to part with it. That old cartoon of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Love Rollercoaster" could be taking up 20 or 30 Megabytes easily.
Uncompressed music files: If you've imported music from CD in native AIFF format, it's taking up ten times the space it needs to. Use iTunes to compress it to mp3 and then toss the original AIFF file. The only time you would need the AIFF is if you were burning a music CD, and I doubt you're doing much of that with your old rev. A iMac.
There are also a variety of OS X-specific files that you can find and delete using the Terminal which will recover even more hard drive space for you, and I've dabbled in this, but it's dangerous and I'm not necessarily going to recommend it to anyone. I don't want to be the guy who sent your Jaguar experience to an early grave just because you tried to chase down a few more megabytes of free space and ended up trashing a required file. For the seasoned and the daring, Macintouch and other help sites, and perhaps a good book or two, will send you on your way to UNIX Terminal proficiency.
Even after you've secured a gigabyte (or more) of free space, your Jaguar experience on your vintage iMac is not going to be a speedy one. Many functions will run even more slowly than they did in OS 9, although not necessarily to the point of being unusable. If you're looking for speed, a five year old computer is not the best place to look. Because the rev. A iMac is unique in having a Rage IIc graphics card, the interface will run considerably more slowly than even on a rev. B iMac, the first to sport the then-trendy Rage Pro graphics card. And no, the graphics card in an iMac is not upgradeable.
Although most of the latest and greatest OS X apps will run, each comes with its own limitations. While iPhoto 2's enhance and crop tools are usable, the retouch brush is a disaster -- you'll see more spinning beach balls than if you had opted for an afternoon at the pool. You can forget about running the latest graphics-intense video games suitably, but then you weren't exactly able to run them well under OS 9 either. Keynote will not even install because it needs at least eight megabytes of video-RAM, and you can't get past six. And don't even think you're going to get away with running pro titles like Maya and DreamWeaver MX.
But don't despair: AppleWorks, Internet Explorer, Safari, Sherlock 3, Mail, Address Book, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, iChat, Microsoft Office, Quicken, and low-intensity games like Solitaire and Snood all work under Jaguar, at varying degrees of slowness. Many of these apps are completely unavailable under OS 9, and that alone should fuel your desire to migrate to MacOS X on your vintage rev. A iMac while you save up for a new eMac, or continue to wait for the next great thing from Apple. If you find you can't live with OS X's limitations on your "slowmobile", you can always boot back to OS 9 with only three clicks of the mouse. But everyone using this particular rev. A iMac found so little use for the days of OS 9 that after awhile, we shut off the Classic environment, and eventually deleted it entirely. For what reason? To save hard drive space, of course. What else?
Have you upgraded your original iMac to MacOS X? Did you find it worthwhile, or did you end up back in the land of OS 9? Have you gone beyond upgrading just the RAM? Have you been as surprised as I was that a computer made back in 1998 can run so much modern software? Update me.
In response to my "Macintosh users, you've never had it so good" column, Todd Betterley writes in:
"Wow, did I do a double take when I read about your epiphany over doing all the great stuff in OS X, but on a '5 year old machine'. That's because my mac at home is that same model, the original revision A bondi iMac (233 Mhz/tray loading CD). But I'm still running OS 9 on that machine and waiting until I can scrape the bucks together to get a new PowerBook, because I was under the impression that you couldn't run OS X on a Rev-A Bondi iMac. Did you do any upgrading to it to be able to run Jaguar? Any info would be greatly appreciated."
Well Todd, MacOS X certainly runs on the original iMac, but it runs with the kinds of limitations you'd expect from a five year old computer. I'll lay out the upgrade process, the limitations, and the best ways for making the most of what you've got, for you and anyone else who might be in your situation.
I've made two hardware upgrades over the years. The first was to boost the video-RAM from the original two megabytes up to six. These days, this'll cost you around five dollars, and I'd recommend it even if you're sticking with OS 9. This is something that only rev. A iMac owners need to do; starting with rev. B, Apple included the extra VRAM itself. Readers who are unsure of whether their iMac needs the extra VRAM should refer to their Apple System Profiler.
The second, vital hardware upgrade is the RAM memory. The first four revisions of the iMac came with a now-paltry 32 Megabytes, barely enough to even so much as boot up OS 9, let alone OS X. I buy my RAM from these guys but you can do your own comparison shopping here. You can boost yourself all the way up to 256 Megabytes (128 in each slot) for around forty dollars, and that's plenty of RAM to run MacOS X. Apple says that the rev. A iMac can't be upgraded past 256 MB, and my experiences have told me the same, but if anyone out there has found a way to take the rev. A any further, please let me know. The rev. B, C, and D models can officially hold up to 512 MB, which equates to more speed under OS X. And with computers this old and slow, you'll want all the speed boosts you can get.
Although I've often been tempted to rip the original four gigabyte hard drive out of my old iMac and replace it with an off-the-shelf 40 or 80 GB model, I've always ended up deciding not to. While RAM upgrades on an original iMac can be done rather harmlessly in ten minutes or less, hard drives are a whole different ballgame. First, you have the unenviable task of moving all your data from the old hard drive to the new one, then reinstalling all your apps, getting all your iLife libraries back where they belong, and so on. Secondly, although at four and a half years old there's no warranty left to void, replacing the hard drive requires taking apart quite a bit of the inside assembly, which exposes you to the possibility that your iMac might not want to boot up anymore once you put it back together. I once had to remove a hard drive from a fully vandalized iMac, and that was difficult enough, even knowing that I wasn't going to have to put the computer back together again once I was done. But for those who enjoy a challenge, Macintouch has several reader descriptions of the process. One word of caution: although I don't normally recommend partitioning your hard drive, if you upgrade your iMac to a drive larger than eight gigabytes, you must create a first partition no larger than eight gigabytes and install your OS X system on that partition. Otherwise, OS X is guaranteed not to work. The good news is that if you think you can live within the confines of the original four gigabytes, you don't have to worry about any of the above technobabble.
If you have decided to stick with your original hard drive, when installing Jaguar, choose the "Custom Install" and uncheck any foreign languages and printer drivers you know you won't need. Sure, the novelty of being able to boot your computer with menus in the Ubamban language might be tempting, but you're going to need that hard drive space for more important things -- trust me on this. By going the Jaguar route on your tiny hard drive, you're volunteering to enter a world in which you obsess over hard drive space the way you once obsessed over wall space in your college dorm room. Especially if you plan to do anything with pictures or music, you don't want to waste any of your precious four gigs on stuff you'll never use.
Installing Jaguar on your rev. A iMac from CD-ROM will take at least a few hours, much longer than the typical Jaguar install, because of the inherent slowness of the computer upon which you're installing it. Once you get Jaguar up and running, you'll want to install the 10.2.5 update immediately. It provides a modest speed boost over 10.2, and you're going to need all the speed you can get. While you're at it, download and install Safari v.73, iPhoto 2, and the AppleWorks 6.2.4 update. Run Software Update (in System Preferences) to what else you're missing in the way of security updates, etc. But be frugal here: if Software Update offers a new version of AirPort software, or iMovie 3, skip it. Your computer doesn't have AirPort or FireWire anyway, so don't waste your precious hard drive space on software you can't even use.
Once you've got your software fully updated, go to your Displays pane in System Preferences and set your colors down to "Thousands". If this sounds like a compromise, it is. It will make your screen look just a bit less perfect, but it will also boost the speed of your computer by what I might ballpark at twenty percent. If you're afraid that you might be missing something by not running at Millions of colors, check the box that places a "Displays" menu on the right-hand side of your toolbar, which allows for one-click toggling of color and resolution settings. This way, you can jump back to Millions of colors if you ever need to. You'll also notice the 800x600 and 1024x768 resolution settings. Ironically, 800x600 is the setting that makes everything larger, despite the smaller numbers. Even if you always ran your iMac in 800x600 mode under OS 9, you might consider trying 1024x768 under OS X to accommodate the larger icons and eye candy of OS X's Aqua interface. Sure, you'll have to sit a little closer to the screen, but if you can adjust to it, you'll be rewarded with the equivalent of having a larger screen.
Double-click your hard drive and take a look at the window's toolbar to see how much hard drive space is available. This will be crucial going forward. In order to keep OS X humming along, you'll need to find a way to keep at least a gigabyte (one thousand megabytes) of space empty so that OS X can use it for virtual memory. If you've already got a gigabyte or more free, you've got nothing to worry about. If you've got less free space than that, you'll need to go on a scavenger hunt looking for things that you don't need. Keep in mind that simple word processing documents take up almost no space at all, and throwing away ten thousand of them still wouldn't make a dent. The following are the kinds of offending items you're looking for, and what you choose to throw away is your business:
Applications you never use: We've all got an old 46 Megabyte demo of a game we'll never play, or an application we were sure we would use every day but haven't launched in years, buried somewhere on our hard drive. Find them and trash them.
Full-screen video files: QuickTime and RealPlayer video clips take up quite a bit of space if they last more than a few seconds or take up a large chunk of the screen. Unless it's footage of your grandchildren, you might want to part with it. That old cartoon of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Love Rollercoaster" could be taking up 20 or 30 Megabytes easily.
Uncompressed music files: If you've imported music from CD in native AIFF format, it's taking up ten times the space it needs to. Use iTunes to compress it to mp3 and then toss the original AIFF file. The only time you would need the AIFF is if you were burning a music CD, and I doubt you're doing much of that with your old rev. A iMac.
There are also a variety of OS X-specific files that you can find and delete using the Terminal which will recover even more hard drive space for you, and I've dabbled in this, but it's dangerous and I'm not necessarily going to recommend it to anyone. I don't want to be the guy who sent your Jaguar experience to an early grave just because you tried to chase down a few more megabytes of free space and ended up trashing a required file. For the seasoned and the daring, Macintouch and other help sites, and perhaps a good book or two, will send you on your way to UNIX Terminal proficiency.
Even after you've secured a gigabyte (or more) of free space, your Jaguar experience on your vintage iMac is not going to be a speedy one. Many functions will run even more slowly than they did in OS 9, although not necessarily to the point of being unusable. If you're looking for speed, a five year old computer is not the best place to look. Because the rev. A iMac is unique in having a Rage IIc graphics card, the interface will run considerably more slowly than even on a rev. B iMac, the first to sport the then-trendy Rage Pro graphics card. And no, the graphics card in an iMac is not upgradeable.
Although most of the latest and greatest OS X apps will run, each comes with its own limitations. While iPhoto 2's enhance and crop tools are usable, the retouch brush is a disaster -- you'll see more spinning beach balls than if you had opted for an afternoon at the pool. You can forget about running the latest graphics-intense video games suitably, but then you weren't exactly able to run them well under OS 9 either. Keynote will not even install because it needs at least eight megabytes of video-RAM, and you can't get past six. And don't even think you're going to get away with running pro titles like Maya and DreamWeaver MX.
But don't despair: AppleWorks, Internet Explorer, Safari, Sherlock 3, Mail, Address Book, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, iChat, Microsoft Office, Quicken, and low-intensity games like Solitaire and Snood all work under Jaguar, at varying degrees of slowness. Many of these apps are completely unavailable under OS 9, and that alone should fuel your desire to migrate to MacOS X on your vintage rev. A iMac while you save up for a new eMac, or continue to wait for the next great thing from Apple. If you find you can't live with OS X's limitations on your "slowmobile", you can always boot back to OS 9 with only three clicks of the mouse. But everyone using this particular rev. A iMac found so little use for the days of OS 9 that after awhile, we shut off the Classic environment, and eventually deleted it entirely. For what reason? To save hard drive space, of course. What else?
Have you upgraded your original iMac to MacOS X? Did you find it worthwhile, or did you end up back in the land of OS 9? Have you gone beyond upgrading just the RAM? Have you been as surprised as I was that a computer made back in 1998 can run so much modern software? Update me.
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