iMac G4 1.25 GHz Gefore FX 5200

[bastifantasti]

Hi all,

decided to upgrade my iMac. Originally it had:

- 1.25 ghz g4
- 256mb ram
- 80gb hard drive
- GeForce FX 5200 (I think, can’t check as its currently installing leopard)

This week I’ve maxed the ram out to 2gb. I’m in the process of waiting for my 250gb SSD upgrade.

two final things on my list:

fan needs replaced as makes a terrible noise - is it just a stands square shaped PC fan?

I want an original airport card to go inside, anyone know which mode I should be looking for on eBay, and will this card have Bluetooth capabilities too?

Look forward to hearing back from some ppc old-timers 🥂

 

[eyoungren]

I want an original airport card to go inside, anyone know which mode I should be looking for on eBay, and will this card have Bluetooth capabilities too?

Original Airport card is 802.11b. No WPA2, and you can get WPA only with later versions of Tiger or Leopard. You have to use TKIP encryption, AES will not allow for a connection to your WiFi.

The original Airport card does not have Bluetooth. It's WiFi only. The later Airport Extreme card does not have Bluetooth. Only late 2005 G5 Macs came with a combo Airport/BT card.

Belkin makes a series of FT model USB adapters that will give you Bluetooth.

 

[Amethyst1]

If only one could replace the fx5200...

 

[bastifantasti]

So leopard even with 2gb of ram is a bit a sluggish. Until the SSD arrives going to revert to tiger. I have the DVD iso on my computer but no DVDs to burn it to. Is it possible to make a bootable usb install like with catalina? Does anyone know the terminal command to do it?

 

[Amethyst1]

Best to use Leopard's Disk Utility to simply restore the Tiger iso to the USB drive if you can.

There's no createinstallmedia command if that's what you meant.

 

[bastifantasti]

Best to use Leopard's Disk Utility to simply restore the Tiger iso to the USB drive if you can.

There's no createinstallmedia command if that's what you meant.

Yes that’s what I meant.

so how do I use leopard to restore tiger from iso? Sorry to be a total novice...but is that possible? If so I give you a kiss and a pizza 😘😓😀🖕

 

[Amethyst1]

Mount Tiger iso by double clicking it so that mac os x install dvd appears on desktop. Open Disk Utility, select flash drive, go to Erase tab and erase it, formatting as Mac os extended (journaled). Go to Restore tab, drag mac os x install dvd to source, flash drive (untitled) to destination. Hit Restore.

 

[bastifantasti]

So I’m currently drinking cider to celebrate a new job and going to attempt this...fingers crossed 🥳🥳🥳

 

[EugW]

What adapter are you using to install the SSD, since the SSD is SATA?

 

[bastifantasti]

What adapter are you using to install the SSD, since the SSD is SATA?

So from OWC I ordered a 2.5inch drive with a mounting bracket and IDE/ATA adapter suitable for legacy systems

 

[TzunamiOSX]

Original Airport card is 802.11b. No WPA2, and you can get WPA only with later versions of Tiger or Leopard. You have to use TKIP encryption, AES will not allow for a connection to your WiFi.

The original Airport card does not have Bluetooth. It's WiFi only. The later Airport Extreme card does not have Bluetooth. Only late 2005 G5 Macs came with a combo Airport/BT card.

Belkin makes a series of FT model USB adapters that will give you Bluetooth.

I also have the iMac G4 1,25 GHz and this one doesn’t have the original Airport card. This iMac has a 802.11g Airport card.

 

[TzunamiOSX]

Perhaps this can also help you with your fan

iMac G4 USB2 upgraded to SSD and 2GB RAM

iMac G4 20" 1,25 GHz and my modifications 1. Change the fan to an Antec Smartcool 9,5 with termal sensor, but the Fan ist a bit to powerful on ~25°C, so I reduced the voltage to around 10,5 Volt with an 15 Ohm, 2 Watt resistor (The value of the resistor is only adjusted for this fan). First...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[TzunamiOSX]

and you need an Airport Extreme Card like in this video

Important:
Be careful when you close the white housing parts, the power cable can be pinched between them very quickly. This can lead to a short circuit.

 

[bastifantasti]

and you need an Airport Extreme Card like in this video

Important:
Be careful when you close the white housing parts, the power cable can be pinched between them very quickly. This can lead to a short circuit.

In the end I decided to stick with ethernet and not buy the AirPort Extreme - I am not sure if it will be compatible with my 5GHz network and for an already slow system I think I'll get the best performance with ethernet. RAM is now 2gb - leopard performance is still sluggish, particularly graphical effects in the GUI. Tiger performance is far superior, so right now keeping Tiger installed. When the SSD arrives I will see how performance in Leopard is, but I expect the graphical issues to still be sluggish, so will probably keep tiger on.

I must say I expected TenFourFox to perform quite well on a 1.25GHz G4 with 2GB of system ram, unfortunately it's VERY sluggish - need to check the correct threads on optimising its performance - if I could get a decent web-browsing experience out of this system I may actually be able to use it for daily tasks rather than just as a novelty...although right now I am starting to think it's place really was in 2003 😓

 

[repairedCheese]

In the end I decided to stick with ethernet and not buy the AirPort Extreme - I am not sure if it will be compatible with my 5GHz network and for an already slow system I think I'll get the best performance with ethernet. RAM is now 2gb - leopard performance is still sluggish, particularly graphical effects in the GUI. Tiger performance is far superior, so right now keeping Tiger installed. When the SSD arrives I will see how performance in Leopard is, but I expect the graphical issues to still be sluggish, so will probably keep tiger on.

I must say I expected TenFourFox to perform quite well on a 1.25GHz G4 with 2GB of system ram, unfortunately it's VERY sluggish - need to check the correct threads on optimising its performance - if I could get a decent web-browsing experience out of this system I may actually be able to use it for daily tasks rather than just as a novelty...although right now I am starting to think it's place really was in 2003 😓

Well, if there's one thing you could do to help the iMac perform better, it would have to be to downgrade to Mac OS 10.4, Tiger. I don't know what they did, but my low end 2ghz Dual CPU Powermac G5 runs circles around my 1.24 Ghz Powermac G4 MDD in Leopard. Oh, sure, javascript still brings TenFourFox to a grinding halt in Tiger on my MDD, everything does that in Leopard. Despite all that, Leopard Webkit does feel like it's faster, even with that overhead, but it's not really worth the trade off for me.

And speaking of making TenFourFox run better, you are absolutely right about checking om the threads about optimizing it. Personally, I recommend foxPEP, and and while you're at it, uBlock Origin and NoScript get a big recommendation from me. I know there's another javascript blocking extension around that's pretty popular, but I can't think of its name off the top of my head, and I never used it, while I can vouch for NoScript.

TenFourFox - Browse /addons/archive at SourceForge.net

Mozilla for Power Macintosh

sourceforge.net

Probably doesn't hurt that you can download those extentions from their Sourceforge.

 

[Raging Dufus]

I know there's another javascript blocking extension around that's pretty popular, but I can't think of its name off the top of my head ...

I'm guessing you're referring to uMatrix, which I use and love. Learned about it from @eyoungren's TFF tweaks thread stickied at the top of this forum. There's a link in his thread, but for convenience here it is:

Release 1.1.4 · gorhill/uMatrix

Much translation work has been imported from https://crowdin.com/project/umatrix. Closed as fixed: Cloud storage merge button broken The pull-and-merge button does not visually render completely ...

github.com

1.1.4 is the last version compatible with TFF. Scroll down to "uMatrix.firefox.xpi", that's the one to get.

 

[repairedCheese]

I'm guessing you're referring to uMatrix, which I use and love. Learned about it from @eyoungren's TFF tweaks thread stickied at the top of this forum. There's a link in his thread, but for convenience here it is:

Release 1.1.4 · gorhill/uMatrix

Much translation work has been imported from https://crowdin.com/project/umatrix. Closed as fixed: Cloud storage merge button broken The pull-and-merge button does not visually render completely ...

github.com

1.1.4 is the last version compatible with TFF. Scroll down to "uMatrix.firefox.xpi", that's the one to get.

Yep, that's the one. What little testing I've tried with it seems to get better results than NoScript, but it's a bit easier to break sites entirely by accident, too.

 

[Raging Dufus]

Yep, that's the one. What little testing I've tried with it seems to get better results than NoScript, but it's a bit easier to break sites entirely by accident, too.

I personally can't stand NoScript. It works, but it's like using a shotgun to kill a cockroach. Perhaps it's changed since I've used it, but I didn't like having to blindly whitelist javascript site by site to get a useful experience.

I much prefer uMatrix's fine-grained control, because it shows me exactly what is being blocked and I can choose to allow just enough to get a site useful. It requires some patience and a learning curve, but it's not hard even for a dufus like me. I use it on every FireFox variant browser I have, on every platform and architecture. On Windows/Intel Mac/x86 Linux it's just helpful, but on PPC it's absolutely essential, at least for me.

 

[eyoungren]

I personally can't stand NoScript. It works, but it's like using a shotgun to kill a cockroach. Perhaps it's changed since I've used it, but I didn't like having to blindly whitelist javascript site by site to get a useful experience.

I much prefer uMatrix's fine-grained control, because it shows me exactly what is being blocked and I can choose to allow just enough to get a site useful. It requires some patience and a learning curve, but it's not hard even for a dufus like me. I use it on every FireFox variant browser I have, on every platform and architecture. On Windows/Intel Mac/x86 Linux it's just helpful, but on PPC it's absolutely essential, at least for me.

I'm using it in Vivaldi on my Intel Macs as well.

It's a Chrome browser addon, which Vivaldi can use.

 

[bastifantasti]

You would not believe my luck. I started posting in the PPC forums a few weeks ago, because on a trip to my parents house I got my old iMac and PowerMac G4s out of the attic and brought them back to my apartment to play with/upgrade. About an hour ago I spilt a drink all over my MacBook Pro. Spent the last hour on the phone with my insurance who agreed to pay for a repair as long as it's done at an apple store. Unbelievable that for the next 2/3 weeks my main computer will be the iMac G4 - definitely need to optimise TenFourFox so that it's usable!!!

Also so strange this happened during my little PPC upgrade era

 

[bastifantasti]

I'm guessing you're referring to uMatrix, which I use and love. Learned about it from @eyoungren's TFF tweaks thread stickied at the top of this forum. There's a link in his thread, but for convenience here it is:

Release 1.1.4 · gorhill/uMatrix

Much translation work has been imported from https://crowdin.com/project/umatrix. Closed as fixed: Cloud storage merge button broken The pull-and-merge button does not visually render completely ...

github.com

1.1.4 is the last version compatible with TFF. Scroll down to "uMatrix.firefox.xpi", that's the one to get.

So I have three options of browser to download for - do i choose firefox?

 

[bastifantasti]

So I have three options of browser to download for - do i choose firefox?

Ignore my ignorant post, of course FireFox

 

[repairedCheese]

You would not believe my luck. I started posting in the PPC forums a few weeks ago, because on a trip to my parents house I got my old iMac and PowerMac G4s out of the attic and brought them back to my apartment to play with/upgrade. About an hour ago I spilt a drink all over my MacBook Pro. Spent the last hour on the phone with my insurance who agreed to pay for a repair as long as it's done at an apple store. Unbelievable that for the next 2/3 weeks my main computer will be the iMac G4 - definitely need to optimise TenFourFox so that it's usable!!!

Also so strange this happened during my little PPC upgrade era

Well then. I honestly wouldn't recommend doing something like this with anything older than a Powermac G5, but you make do with what you have. And since you have Leopard installed, Leopard Webkit is a must in my opinion.

leopard-webkit / Wiki / Home

sourceforge.net

I say that because it generally runs circles around TFF, and the only reason no one makes it a main browser is because it's quite unstable. It hasn't been updated since 2018 or so, but it's still modern enough to do most things. Just generally be prepared for it to crash.

Browsing the web on a PowerPC Mac tends to mean using different web browsers for different things, since some are better than others and you're going to have to figure out which ones work on the sites you use. But for the most part, it's still doable, just slow.

 

[z970]

@repairedCheese @bastifantasti I've heard that there was an issue with some version of Safari once that prompted crashes when the minimum font size was not set to 2.

So, I've set the minimum font size to 2 on all my Leopard WebKit installs (when I still used it, that is), and do not click anywhere on the page when the spinning pinwheel of death appears (because I have noticed it is more likely to crash when there is compounded user input when the pinwheel happens).

As long as you do that, it should not be quite so crash-happy as before. An ad-blocking style sheet, proxy, or hosts file like MVPS Hosts to lessen resource demand (lowering the chance of the pinwheel) ought to help too.

 

[bastifantasti]

Well, currently I have Tiger installed because i found leopard to be too resource intensive visually e.g making the dock appear from hidden was horrendously slow.

When my SSD arrives I am more than likely to upgrade to Leopard and there is a Terminal command to remove some of the dock effects and return it to something that resembles the Tiger/before dock.

I am curious to know what webkit is, I will good that now to understand more.

All of my documents, music, photos, etc were stored on my OneDrive account (don't judge me, it comes as part of office 365 and I think it's superior to iDrive or whatever its called now) - unfortunately there is no PPC app to sync documents, but I am able to access them via the browser (takes a long time). In general my G4 experience is not going so badly - I just miss things like facetime to call family, and i miss the messages app, as in the apartment i tend to use my MacBook for communication and not the iPhone.

I have totally fallen in love all over again with the iMac - i'm reminded of how classy it felt to have one circa 2003 when everyone else was still using ugly Windows XP desktops with dreadful cables all over the place yes i am that superficial