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Jessica Lares

macrumors G3
Original poster
Oct 31, 2009
9,612
1,062
Near Dallas, Texas, USA
I just bought an Apple iBook G3/466 SE from eBay and am wondering what options do I have regarding hard drives? Like, besides the size limitation, which type am I looking for? Same question about upgrading the RAM.
 
Any 2.5" PATA HDD will work but you will only be limited to 128gb of usable space if you buy a larger HDD. I think there are apps out there that can remove that limitation.

512mb PC100/133 sodimm will work too. Make sure it's low-density and you should be good to go.
 
Okay, thanks guys! I'll see if I have anything lying about. I know I have some hard drives/ram, knew about the machine not seeing anything bigger too. I just wanted confirmation of the fine details. :D.
 
ram+SSD=fast laptop.

late to the party...

had a 466 running 1x512mb sticks, and a 120gb drive. that will work with nothing else required. hardware only, nothing tricky.

make sure you use low density or 'mac approved' ram and you you should be good to go. a faster/ssd IDE would also help, but depends on how much you have to spend. best of luck.
 
late to the party...

had a 466 running 2x512mb sticks, and a 120gb drive. that will work with nothing else required. hardware only, nothing tricky.

make sure you use low density or 'mac approved' ram and you you should be good to go. a faster/ssd IDE would also help, but depends on how much you have to spend. best of luck.

Completely off topic but I just started F@H and completed my first WU today. Now my Quad is pulling double duty as a folding machine :)
 
had a 466 running 2x512mb sticks...

That seems unlikely seeing as the Clamshells only have 1 SODIMM slot.

@OP: As far as upgrades go, I have one exactly like yours, and I say it's in your best interest to just buy an external firewire HDD for your larger files. Tearing apart the Clamshell is pretty tedious. The RAM upgrade will be easy, just pop off the keyboard, remove the airport card and a couple screws and you're there. As far as software tweaks, here's a list of things I've done to speed mine up:

1) Disabled "shadows" with the application 'ShadowKiller'
2) Disabled Spotlight and the Dashboard with "Disable Tiger Features"
3) Changed my color scheme to "thousands of colors." (it's not even noticable on most tasks)
4) Removed extra languages/unneeded architecture with "Monolingual"
5) Installed "Camino" (and turned on the "flash blocker" built in the browser)
6) Changed the minimize effect to "Scaled Effect" instead of "Genie Effect"

For a 10 year old laptop, it still does pretty well. Good luck with the project.

EDIT: Forgot to mention: You should check out the program "MacTracker." It's a great program that shows stats of virtually every Apple product from the original Macintosh back in '84 all the way up to today.
 
Haha, I don't care about the mods being too hard, I've been watching my dad take apart CPUs for the last 20 years, so know my way around doing it, just not sure about the parts I need.

I have one of these with more memory than that of my iBook, I have no idea about the low vs high density though. http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/10832_div/10832_div.HTML But seems to have the 133 specification. I'll have to check the other machines we have, I know there's a hard drive sitting on a shelf...

Tiger seems to be working good with the little RAM it has though.
 
Haha, I don't care about the mods being too hard, I've been watching my dad take apart CPUs for the last 20 years, so know my way around doing it, just not sure about the parts I need.

I have one of these with more memory than that of my iBook, I have no idea about the low vs high density though. http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/10832_div/10832_div.HTML But seems to have the 133 specification. I'll have to check the other machines we have, I know there's a hard drive sitting on a shelf...

Tiger seems to be working good with the little RAM it has though.

You need "sodimm" laptop memory, that's "dimm" desktop memory. Low density memory will have black chips on both sides of the memory stick.
 
You need "sodimm" laptop memory, that's "dimm" desktop memory. Low density memory will have black chips on both sides of the memory stick.

Alright, it has a ATA hard drive in it though, would that work?

EDIT: At least for backup, I think it's the same size as my iBook's.
EDIT 2: My Compaq Presario has a ATA drive too, knew there was a reason I've been keeping it. LOL. I'm cheap. :p.
 
I am running the same machine as my school/internet surfing machine. It doesn't set the world on fire, but for it's age, it's fantastic.

The hard drive is ATA. Also referred to varyingly as PATA and EIDE. Get the best deal you can find on an internal drive and stick it in, and you'll see tremendous improvements. I replaced my 10Gb drive with a 160Gb not a week ago (although of course I can only use 128Gb of that), and the speed increase is definitely noticeable. I only paid $50 through my work for the drive. Backup or not, however, I wouldn't want to chance using the machine for anything important on the original drive; they're just too old to be reliable. My old drive rattles! If it was working before, it wouldn't have been working much longer.

Replacing the drive is a bear of a job however. I had to remove a previously stripped screw from the top cover using pliers, and I sliced open my index finger when I was pulling the top cover off. Plan about three hours, and be very meticulous (bag your screws on each step, etc), and you shouldn't have any issues (aside from the ones I had, the machine went back together fine and fired up first try!).

Good luck! Hope you enjoy your Clamshell as much as I do.
 
Has anyone tried sticking 1GB of memory into their clamshell? So far I managed OS X Tiger with all the updates, iTunes 9.1.1 (And it actually found my iPhone 4 but said I needed 9.2 which doesn't work), and Safari 4. Doesn't work too bad with the 192 MB.

Oh, and I stuck an AirPort card I got for $20, some lady is selling me all her clamshell parts that she has sitting around from leftover upgrades.
 
1gb won't work. only 512mb sticks will work along with the 64mb of soldered memory so you will have 576mb max.

Those original Airport cards sure have came down in price. I remember just a year or two ago they were still fetching $50+. Great that you're bringing life back to such an old and classic computer.
 
1gb won't work. only 512mb sticks will work along with the 64mb of soldered memory so you will have 576mb max.

Those original Airport cards sure have came down in price. I remember just a year or two ago they were still fetching $50+. Great that you're bringing life back to such an old and classic computer.

Bleh, okay then, I'll just buy a stick off eBay then. Yeah, almost bought a card for $30 until I saw the $19 one. Was lucky to buy an untouched 466 for $50 with a perfect keyboard, only thing is that the yo yo charger is patched up and it loses the battery and thinks it's not there after two hours. Tried a PMU reset, but it didn't work.

Basically I've wanted one for awhile now since I saw it in person running Photoshop. Now that my MacBook Pro's keyboard needs to be replaced, I decided to invest in one of these for awhile.

If it was my choice, I'd have every single Apple model since 1990, but I have a little room and even the iMac takes the ENTIRE desk. My PowerMac is still at my dad's office for the same reason. Although to be fair, I have to get rid of the other old computers sitting there, so it's another thing. You open up any cabinet in our house and there's either an IBM desktop, IBM laptop, 1996 scanner, or just old computer parts like RAM/hard drives, etc. Plus we have multiple boxes with CDs and bootleg floppies. We're KINDA collectors, but not so much in a way.
 
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