iMac G3 help

[gohome190]

Hey, I recently bought a G3 400 iMac. Having OSX Panther is cool, and I am surprised that such an old system can run this relatively new OS.

Anyway, I have a few questions.
1. Is there any way to stop the high pitched hum from (presumably) the HDD? It is quite annoying, almost headache inducing.

2. How do I know if my iMac is a DV? Or special edition?

3. My mac has 256 mb ram, with two 128 sticks. Does the iMac have only two RAM slots? Would upping the RAM to 512 make a worthy difference?

4. the mac can play a DVD fine, but it can't play an online video well at all. Even when I download video files (such as this week's edition of Diggnation), it plays them, but unwatchably laggy. So, is there any way to correct this problem? Would buying more RAM or a better Video Card be worth it?



Thanks for the help!

P.S. I'm enjoying OSX a lot better than XP...

 

[CanadaRAM]

Hey, I recently bought a G3 400 iMac. Having OSX Panther is cool, and I am surprised that such an old system can run this relatively new OS.

Anyway, I have a few questions.
1. Is there any way to stop the high pitched hum from (presumably) the HDD? It is quite annoying, almost headache inducing.

If it is a continuous very high pitched squeal, it may be the flyback transformer of the CRT. If it comes and goes with hard drive activity it may be the drive, either way it is a hardware repair if you want to do anything about it.

2. How do I know if my iMac is a DV? Or special edition?

Does it have a Firewire port?

3. My mac has 256 mb ram, with two 128 sticks. Does the iMac have only two RAM slots? Would upping the RAM to 512 make a worthy difference?

Yes and Yes. You can go to 1 Gb total RAM with 2 x 512 Mb PC100 or PC133 DIMMs (just make sure they are Mac compatible, typical high density PC133 generics will NOT work)

4. the mac can play a DVD fine, but it can't play an online video well at all. Even when I download video files (such as this week's edition of Diggnation), it plays them, but unwatchably laggy. So, is there any way to correct this problem? Would buying more RAM or a better Video Card be worth it?

RAM is about all you can do, you can't do anything practical to upgrade the video.

 

[gohome190]

Thanks. And yes, it has two firewire ports. Do you think doubling the RAM will allow me to view videos? I mean, since it plays DVD's great, it obviously is capable of playing videos. It didn't make sense to me...

 

[CanadaRAM]

Thanks. And yes, it has two firewire ports. Do you think doubling the RAM will allow me to view videos? I mean, since it plays DVD's great, it obviously is capable of playing videos. It didn't make sense to me...

If it has Firewire, it's a DV model. That's all the DV means.

Whether it will play DVDs smoothly or not depends both on the RAM, and on the DVD playing software. Look at Versiontracker.com for alternative shareware players.