Resolved Bought an E-Mac, now a few more questions.

[RafeDonson]

I've seen an eMac at my local pawnbroker store, going for £50.00, though I'm hoping I can get them down to £40.00 if I decide to buy it. It has a six month guarantee and I'm going to check the spec out first. I plan on plugging it into a monitor with a KVM switch so I can use it like a Mac Mini.

My questions are - if it's 1.00 GHZ +, is it work it for the money? Also, is there any way of getting a higher resolution out of it with my widescreen monitor? The highest resolution they support via VGA out seems to be 1280 x 960.

 

[ihuman:D]

I'd say £50 is a good deal, not sure about your monitor issues though.

 

[666sheep]

Also, is there any way of getting a higher resolution out of it with my widescreen monitor? The highest resolution they support via VGA out seems to be 1280 x 960.

You need Screen spanning doctor to enable desktop spanning and better resolutions on external. By default eMac can only mirror its desktop. It will work with all eMac models except these with GF2 MX (700 & 800 MHz).

I wouldn't pay £50.00 for any eMac except 1.42 one. But it depends on your local prices level. On my local market, you can get 1.42 with 1GB, AP, BT and alu kbd for equivalent of £55 - 60. PowerPC Macs are dirt cheap around here, maybe except Quads - those are highly overpriced. Kids here want to have the latest and greatest to run FB and YT, so they consider PowerPC as old crap

 

[MS Windows]

Geez...I could've hooked you up with a few eMacs a week ago...we were just throwing 80 of them out at work!

 

[RafeDonson]

Geez...I could've hooked you up with a few eMacs a week ago...we were just throwing 80 of them out at work!

Curses, foiled again. Well, as it happens I got the eMac, which turned out to be a 1.25Ghz one with 256MB of memory and Panther. There was no password and no recovery disks, so I talked the shop into giving it me for £40. I got it back home and eventually managed to get past the password... shortly afterwards I spotted the password was written on the underside of the keyboard!

It's working okay - I've got a 6 month guarantee apparently - and I plan on upgrading the memory to 2GB pretty soon. However, I've still got a few issues - help would be appreciated.

1) Safari won't work - the icon bounces and won't open. The 'get info' function indicates it's version 2, so I gather the problem is that Panther - the OS that's on the E-Mac - doesn't support that. But 1.3 isn't downloadable, only the patches are. Is there any way of getting 1.3 back on their without doing a system restore? I'm using Camino for now but I'd prefer the highest version of Safari I can get, so not 1.2 either.

2) How do I figure out which restore discs I need? There seem to be a fair few on E-Bay, but I'm wary of getting the wrong ones. I could contact Apple but I suspect they don't keep discs that old around.

3) Is there any point upgrading to Leopard, once I've increased the memory? It might give me access to slightly newer software but will it be significantly slower?

4) Are software updates still online for OS X 10.3? If I do buy a set of recovery disks, and the updates aren't available, I'd be taking a step back from 10.3.9 which is where I am now.

 

[Lil Chillbil]

Curses, foiled again. Well, as it happens I got the eMac, which turned out to be a 1.25Ghz one with 256MB of memory and Panther. There was no password and no recovery disks, so I talked the shop into giving it me for £40. I got it back home and eventually managed to get past the password... shortly afterwards I spotted the password was written on the underside of the keyboard!

It's working okay - I've got a 6 month guarantee apparently - and I plan on upgrading the memory to 2GB pretty soon. However, I've still got a few issues - help would be appreciated.

1) Safari won't work - the icon bounces and won't open. The 'get info' function indicates it's version 2, so I gather the problem is that Panther - the OS that's on the E-Mac - doesn't support that. But 1.3 isn't downloadable, only the patches are. Is there any way of getting 1.3 back on their without doing a system restore? I'm using Camino for now but I'd prefer the highest version of Safari I can get, so not 1.2 either.

2) How do I figure out which restore discs I need? There seem to be a fair few on E-Bay, but I'm wary of getting the wrong ones. I could contact Apple but I suspect they don't keep discs that old around.

3) Is there any point upgrading to Leopard, once I've increased the memory? It might give me access to slightly newer software but will it be significantly slower?

4) Are software updates still online for OS X 10.3? If I do buy a set of recovery disks, and the updates aren't available, I'd be taking a step back from 10.3.9 which is where I am now.

1) that sucks that your screwed on internet without a system restore

2) don't buy restore discs just get a plain ole' panther disc set

3) leopard will run good on this system with max ram and I highly recommend it

4) yes software updates are still available but they are not updating panther anymore

 

[Lil Chillbil]

and while your at it you might want to replace the pram battery as the originals in these have pretty much reached the end of the road

 

[666sheep]

There's one answer for all 4 questions:
Forget it, get 10.4 or 10.5, get new HDD, install OS and enjoy your new eMac.
Panther was fine until Tiger was released.

 

[RafeDonson]

There's one answer for all 4 questions:
Forget it, get 10.4 or 10.5, get new HDD, install OS and enjoy your new eMac.
Panther was fine until Tiger was released.

I got Tiger in the end.. oddly, the EMac has 80GB, so I'm going to plug in a USB drive for storage and upgrade the memory ASAP.