# imac users please read this ...



## sithious (Dec 15, 2001)

... okay, here's my question: 
my dad, having seen what i can do with os x, wants desperately to upgrade his system. 
he's got a 350 mhz imac with 128 mb ram currently running 9.1 ... 
will os x work properly on this? or will it be painfully slow and drive him to exasperation?
have these problems been cleared up with 10.1?
should he get more ram or will the 128 mb do? (apart from the fact that more ram is always better, but you know what i mean, i don't want to make him fork out more money than absolutely necessary, he's not a geek or a gamer...) 

all you imac users out there, i'd really appreciate your advice...


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## sebastiant (Dec 15, 2001)

I have a iMac 266 with 160ram and i cant stand it.
After using OSX a couple of days, OS9 is a wonderfull, wonderfull thing.

If your father have been using classic macos I guess he needs to startup classic in macosx. Which means he need alot of ram. Like +512 mb.

Dont you think?


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## tagliatelle (Dec 15, 2001)

Apple confirms that it will run, but nothing more.


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## sithious (Dec 15, 2001)

thanks, sebastiant! 

... but do you think it's more of a ram thing or could it be the mhz also?

and i'm not really certain he needs classic at all:
all he does is receive and send emails (mail.app), surf the web (omniweb), do office stuff like writing letters (apple works) listen to music (itunes) and maybe watch some quicktime films (er... quicktime), 
so he might be able to get away without using classic at all ... !?

and thanks, herve,
but that, of course, is my dilemma: apple confirms a lot of stuff, but i'm not going to actually believe it until i've had a user comfirm it too ...  apple also pretended 10.0 was a final release lol


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## Jayem (Dec 15, 2001)

i have a 350Mhz imac indigo with 128... its not the greatest, but with 10.1 its bearable... just get a 128 chip ( dirt cheap these days) and it should run great. Im going to do that today actually.


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## sithious (Dec 15, 2001)

... that sounds like a feasible idea... thanks, jayem!


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## Nachohat (Dec 15, 2001)

I run 10.1 on  a beige 266mhz with 256mb of RAM. It's not so bad. Just make sur you are runing in thousands of colours (not millions!). Of course my Tibook runs X much better, but the beige still isn't bad for a 3 year old machine.

I think that your 350mhz imac should be fine.  Loading it with RAM would definatly help.


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## edX (Dec 15, 2001)

well, as you might have noticed i have a 400. probably not a noticable difference for small short tasks as you described in your dad's habits. Might make a difference creating large graphics, editing movies, opening and using several apps at once, etc..  We also have a 600 in the house to compare against. the 400 is definitly not as quick and crisp but it's not an unbearable difference from my perspective. Just a second or two longer to launch apps, load web pages, etc. 
I saw huge gains when i went from 128 to 512mb ram. now i am looking at how much it will cost to double that.  I think you will be ok as long as you significantly improve ram. My advice would be just to max it out the first time. 
if you had asked this question a few weeks ago i would have warned you he would be upset with appleworks and tell you to get rid of x as soona s you put it on. 6.2.2 works great though. so make sure to update his aw when you upgrade him to x. I would also install ASM so he won't keep reaching for the upper right hand corner and cuss cause there's nothing there. He might bitch some for a few days anyway, but once he figures out how much frustration he saves by not crashing and rebooting, he'll love you like a son again!!


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## SCrossman (Dec 15, 2001)

Memory, the more you have, the better your computer will run, especially with X. 512mb is perfect for your dad on an iMac. My next purchase is a 512mb stick to replace a 64mb in my cube to move up to 1gb+ RAM. I get some paging to disk with what I have now, usually when running something in Classic along with the many many native X apps.
I run my iMac 500 with the latest OS 9.x. It is nice and crisp at 1024x768, for me. X looks better @ 1200x1024 or larger on an LCD. I have found X 10.1 quite usable on my Wallstreet 266 with 192mb of RAM. It is certainly no speed demon, but neither is a 56k modem connection, which can bottleneck your entire Mac.


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## bookem (Dec 15, 2001)

512 is definitely better than 256, on my imac 400 anyway.  I have a 333 on my desk with 160Mb in it, and it just seems so much slower than mine at home.  My ibook 500 has 384Mb in it - whish i could afford a 512Mb chip for it.  It would seem it's not just about CPU speed.  I also had a beige 266 for a while with 512 in it, and it was quite surprising how quick it was in 10.1.


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## yoshi (Dec 15, 2001)

I have the 400Mhz version of that machine and I found out that RAM isn't the only thing that vastly affects OS X, Hard Drive speed does too. I know that this series of slot loaders is only ATA/33 but the stock drives they ship with can't saturate that or at least the 13GB drive mine came with couldn't. When I added my 2 256MB PC100 RAM it helped tons but I still had a slower Hard drive so I took my spare 40GB IBM Hard Drive and popped it in and everything seemed to speed up a whole lot. But in your case I think RAM and a little bit of performance hacking should do the trick for OS X.

-Dave


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## WoLF (Dec 16, 2001)

runs kinda slow on my 400mhz iMac
i may get a 512 MB stick of ram and see what happens


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## rubberchicken (Dec 16, 2001)

like others posting above I have found that memory is good and swapping your drive for a 7200 rpm model is almost as good as adding a hundred MHZ, do not use a small amount of ram and a drive with no space as the virtual memory will kill your hard drive in a week.


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## serpicolugnut (Dec 17, 2001)

at

http://www.macosxcentric.com


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## genghiscohen (Dec 17, 2001)

I also have a 350Mhz slot-loading iMac, but I've souped it up with 768MB of RAM and a 40GB Maxtor hard drive.  Your dad can do the same (or you can do it for him) for about $150.
I find 10.1.1 on my machine quite acceptable in terms of performance.


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## John Melby (Dec 17, 2001)

I've just installed OS X 10.1.1 on a client's original iMac (266 MHz), and it runs like a top--decent speed comparable favorably (surprise) to that of OS 9.x, no glitches of any kind that he has noticed.

BUT . . . you MUST max out the RAM (I believe that the maximum figure for that machine is 288 MB--the on-board 32 MB and an installed 256 MB chip). RAM is so cheap right now that they're practically giving it away. Once you do that, it should be quite adequate.


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## rubberchicken (Dec 17, 2001)

> _Originally posted by John Melby _
> *
> BUT . . . you MUST max out the RAM (I believe that the maximum figure for that machine is 288 MB--the on-board 32 MB and an installed 256 MB chip). RAM is so cheap right now that they're practically giving it away. Once you do that, it should be quite adequate. *


None of the iMacs have any onboard memory.

If you have a tray load iMac you can easily upgrade its memory to 384MB by putting a 256MB high profile in the top slot and a 128MB low profile card in the bottom slot.

The tray load models have a second slot under the processor that is not supposed to be user installable without voiding the warranty.

If you have a slot load iMac it can be upgraded to 1GB with 2 512MB pc100 dimms.


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## RacerX (Dec 17, 2001)

I have an iMac/350, 320 MB of RAM and a 30 GB hard drive. 10.1 runs just fine for me. I watch quicktime movies with out any problems, and play Unreal Tournament in it (actually, after install in UT for X I couldn't run it in 9.2 any more, but then again, now I don't need too). Running the ten filters that I use the most in photoshop I found (by recording and adding up the times) that it was about 15% slower in classic mode on large files (which I don't work with much any more anyways). For smaller (web type) images, I can't even measure the difference.

The only reason for me to restart into 9.2 is for VPC and some of my other games. Even Netscape 4.7 runs fine in classic mode for my wife. I have never quite understood where people were having "problems" with the speed of the interface. Everything has some animation to it in Mac OS X, which means it can't act instantly, or there wouldn't be any animation. I would only consider a system to be slow if I could out type it (like Word 6.0 on 68030 systems for those of you who can remember back that far). No one but speed junkies would consider OS X on a 350 slow, and if UT is playable to the point that I haven't put a second installation for 9.2 on my system... how slow can it really be?

As has been pointed out, the more RAM the better. At this point, 320 MB is working fine for me, but I may replace my 64 with another 256 in the near future for 512 MB. I haven't felt the need to yet though.


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## John Melby (Dec 17, 2001)

> None of the iMacs have any onboard memory.


I should have been clearer in my explanation. By "onboard memory," I simply meant the memory that is usually accessible relatively easily by the user. Having installed memory in both the upper and lower slots, I can testify that at least for me, changing the memory in the lower slot is a royal pain in the ass.

I am, however, grateful that you pointed out to me that these iMacs can be upgraded to 384 MB. All of the documentation that I had (which was old information, I should add) implied (or at least I inferred from it) that the maximum amount of RAM for these machines was 288 MB. I stand corrected.


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## rubberchicken (Dec 18, 2001)

This might interest you as well, allegedly a 256MB bottom slot module can be used if it is a special chip layout, I can't scource any of these in Australia as my usual memory suppliers won't touch it. They claim they are unstable or not reliable. Unfortunately I can't find a link to it right now.


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## mindbend (Dec 18, 2001)

I've got 512 in this thing and I'm comfortable with X. I actually use Final Cut Pro on it and it runs great. I play Myth in Classic and it's glass smooth. I still hate web browsing in X and window resizing, but it's not much worse than my G4 450, so the iMac holds its own.

I would get more RAM and jump on board the X bandwagon. For the casual user, X on an iMac is a really nice visual and interface experience.


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## scruffy (Dec 19, 2001)

I have a suspicion that most satisfied OmniWeb users must have monster fast computers.  I have a 300 MHz BW G3, so basically the same computer as your iMac but with a bit more room in the case, and Omni is sloooooow (like I always overshoot when I go back a page, because I click the back button, nothing happens for a while, I click it again, and then I go back two pages type slow).  IE is bearable once it is running, although it takes a long time to start...

With 192 MB RAM (I now have a bit more) at 300 MHz, 10.1 was fine, all apps but Omni were perfectly OK, and Classic didn't bog things down too much.


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## zonetuke (Dec 30, 2001)

> _Originally posted by genghiscohen _
> *I also have a 350Mhz slot-loading iMac, but I've souped it up with 768MB of RAM and a 40GB Maxtor hard drive.  Your dad can do the same (or you can do it for him) for about $150.
> I find 10.1.1 on my machine quite acceptable in terms of performance.   *


I want to upgrade my wife's iMac 350 to X.  It only has 192 MB of ram.  I would upgrade the hard drive to a 7200 rpm Maxtor.  How would you compare 9.x to X in terms of snappiness and speed???


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## Michael_Aos (Dec 30, 2001)

I've been running MacOS X on my 256M, 266Mhz iMac since it was first available.  I like it.

10.1 is MUCH better, but it doesn't play nice with my printer.  :-(

Mike


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## genghiscohen (Dec 30, 2001)

Zonetuke,
I recommend adding RAM to your wife's iMac. You can get a 512 MB stick for around $50, and that will greatly improve the performance of OS X.
With my setup, X is still a bit slower than 9 as far as Finder response.


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## zonetuke (Dec 30, 2001)

> _Originally posted by genghiscohen _
> *Zonetuke,
> I recommend adding RAM to your wife's iMac. You can get a 512 MB stick for around $50, and that will greatly improve the performance of OS X.
> With my setup, X is still a bit slower than 9 as far as Finder response. *


genghiscohen,

Thanks for responding.  Yeah, I would throw a 40 GB Maxtor and 512 stick in there before upgrading.

All she uses is Outlook (Entourage when I receive OFfice X in the next few days), Palm Desktop, and web surfin.  If those basic daily tasks are slower in X then I'd rather not upgrade her.  What's your take?


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## genghiscohen (Dec 30, 2001)

Palm syncing in OS X is in beta still, and there would be *minor* speed hits in the web-surfing and emailing.  You're probably better off waiting another 6 months to a year before switching her over to OS X full time.


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## bookem (Dec 30, 2001)

Memory & hard disk speed together really seem to improve the performance.  I reinstalled both my iBook & iMac about a week ago doing exactly the same steps on each.  The iMac 400/512Mb with a 20Gb ATA100 7200rpm drive is more responsive to use than my iBook 500/384Mb with a 20GB ATA100 4200 rpm drive.  The iBook is quicker at compiling though.


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