What to do with my old ibook G4

Provided it's not too beaten up (apart from the battery!) you can probably sell it for a reasonable price - macs tend to hold their value well

fluidedge said:

Hi,

So by tonight, i'm either buying a mac pro or this new macbookair thing. This leaves me the question of what to do with my old 12" ibook G4 that has been used all day everyday for 3 years! The battery is so dead it will run for about 3 minutes before it cuts out!

I was wondering what i could do with it - i'm thinking if turning it into some sort of jukebox to just play itunes. It only has a 30GB HD so i was thinking i might put in an 80GB drive perhaps. And treat it to a new battery.

Anyone got any better ideas of what to do with it?

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Use it as the coolest table-mat ever

Keep it. It is always good to have a backup. Buy a new battery.

fluidedge said:

I'm thinking i will keep it, but strip it right back to just keep my best tunes on it (about 5-6GB) leaving me with about 20GB. Then i'll hook up my eyetv to it and use it as a media centre type thing.

And buy a new battery.

Can you hook an ibook up to a TV to play movies/music through frontrow?

I could put in a bigger HD an turn it into an TV!

I'm also due to go travelling in the next few months, so taking a 12" ibook could be cool and if it gets damaged/lost then it's not the end of the world.

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I too have an old G4 iBook... a couple of questions if you could help me out.

How can i tell exactly when the iBook was built?
it currently has the standard 512 mb ram in it, how easy is it to upgrade and how benificial would it be?
where is the best place to get a new battery and new ram ect in the UK?

my iBook is my little beauty, i am not going to get rid of it as it has been so good to me, my wife wants it when i get a new macbook so i know it will be going to a good home (well at the very least i will be keeping an eye on it still.
i was all set to splash the cash after the "Lets' Rock" event on a new macbook but alas Jobs saw fit to not announce anything on the macbook front.

i also have a white (i think its 3rd gen) 20 gb ipod that has had 3 battery replacements and currently keeps its charge for about 30 mins!!! i still use it as a backup device and i keep 15 gb of music on it that i can top up my iBook and Macmini when required.

thanks for reading.
Michael.

Ebay you will be surprised what you cam get for it.

ibook g4 update

I have an ibook g4 too. It still works well except for the fact that I can't seem to update firefox browser anymore. I am on a budget and can't afford more than about 900 for new computer. The g4 covers a lot of the stuff I want to do. Word processing and internet. Best Buy guy said Macs have decreased in price. But that I would have to buy the software for word processing. Which, in buyers language, means they haven't decreased in price because now you have to buy more software. I don't get it. I only checked out the new ones because I need to start sending more stuff in .doc and rtf files and would like to be able to update my browser. Anybody got an answer for a not so savvy tech dip like me.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Same question except that mine is broken. When it ran, it ran surprisingly well but, one day, it kind of died. Now it turns on but only for around 5-10 minutes before totally freezing. I've assumed it's near worthless as it's old and broken but just wondered if anyone had any surprise suggestions for what to do with it...

Actually, just remembered I've got another one somewhere (given to me for free by a friend of a friend as a replacement for the other one) which never even got past the start-up screen.

If they were fairly easy and cheap to fix I wouldn't mind using them as just a juke box in the lounge or something...

What would you do?

Jeez, lifestory.

This thread is three years old. Come onnnnnnnnnnnn

burnout8488 said:

This thread is three years old. Come onnnnnnnnnnnn

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so...?

sn said:

so...?

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So, the point is I THINK that the OP has probably figured out "what to do with his old iBook G4" since January 2008. Thusly, this thread is useless.

This is the second thread resurrection following the September 2008 bump... Can I get an amen / thread lock?

But I was using the thread to ask my own very similar question, not answering the op's three year old question. Thought that might annoy people less than starting a whole new thread. Feels like you can't win sometimes. Was actually trying NOT to p*** people off.

whistle said:

I have an ibook g4 too. It still works well except for the fact that I can't seem to update firefox browser anymore. I am on a budget and can't afford more than about 900 for new computer. The g4 covers a lot of the stuff I want to do. Word processing and internet. Best Buy guy said Macs have decreased in price. But that I would have to buy the software for word processing. Which, in buyers language, means they haven't decreased in price because now you have to buy more software. I don't get it. I only checked out the new ones because I need to start sending more stuff in .doc and rtf files and would like to be able to update my browser. Anybody got an answer for a not so savvy tech dip like me.

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Firefox: -> use this http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ install the latest flashplayer read this https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/12847652/, read this post here https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/12849484/ for other web solutions (youtube media watching)

For word processing and reading .doc-files use freeware like OpenOffice or NeoOffice, LibreOffice and Zotero for databases/lists (search this thread http://www.macuser.de/forum/f19/open-office-guter-580464/index2.html for other alternatives with google translator or make a new thread for wordprocessing software on PPC-Macs.

sn said:

... mine is broken. (...) it turns on but only for around 5-10 minutes before totally freezing.

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could be the famous graphics chip overheating problem. Try pressing your wrist on the left side, besides the trackpad / fromt of the left keyboard side. If it starts properly, it indicates, that you have to fasten the graphics chip (ifixit shows how). You should also see schemes behind the black TFT.
Does it get enough power? (can you see the light on the powercord?).
ifixit.com gives a lot of "walk through"-descriptions on several repair topics. Look arround a bit there to get a feel of the work it involves.

sn said:

I've assumed it's near worthless as it's old and broken

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Even broken ibooks go for 60-100EUR on Ebay (better then nothing). You have a good chance to sell it at that price, if you describe the problems with start-up for 5-10minutes.

sn said:

Actually, just remembered I've got another one somewhere ... which never even got past the start-up screen.If they were fairly easy and cheap to fix I wouldn't mind using them as just a juke box in the lounge or something...

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Sell it on Ebay as a whole (for someone who needs parts) or use ifixit.com, you might want to pull the HDD out for the data on it, before selling...

sn said:

But I was using the thread to ask my own very similar question, not answering the op's three year old question. Thought that might annoy people less than starting a whole new thread. Feels like you can't win sometimes. Was actually trying NOT to p*** people off.

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Totally understand, and I know what never pleasing people feels like. Try working as a tech at a college full of impatient kids. Weeeee...

For future reference, people don't usually mind a mildly old thread being resurrected, in fact, I usually prefer it. You are right, in that it saves duplicates of the same question from being asked in many threads.

(I think 2 reasons this one was iffy and people got peeved were A) the thread was a tailored question that only related to the OP, and B) the thread wasn't resurrected by a few weeks or a few months, it was dug up after 3 years.)

Again, don't take it personally. I didn't mean to sound pissed, but really old & dead threads are usually better off dead. This was one, albeit related. No detrimental harm done, though.

These things still net a good $300 or so considering its a G4. Either sell it or buy a new battery to be honest. This machine still has a decent amount of life left in it, as as others said, it isn't a bad idea to have a backup computer.