Purchasing an iMac G3- bad idea?

[rafifreak00]

Ram

Well, I love this iMac inside and out but the 384MB of RAM just won't cut it...
Don't get me wrong, it's fast for what it is currently, but I'm a speed freak so-

The question I have is... what kind of RAM is compatible with an iMac G3?
I checked System Profiler, and inspected the 256 and 128 from inside my iMac and found out that they are PC100 chips... I searched those up on Google and found that they are essentially the same as PC133 sticks.

Are PC133 sticks compatible with iMac G3s? If they are, I'm planning to get two 512's at $90 each.
If they aren't... well... the highest PC100 I can find on my budget are 256's... so I'm gonna be stuck with 512MB total.

Hmm...

 

[floam]

.

 

[KingYaba]

I find it a waste of a hundred bucks.

 

[macman2790]

dont do it

 

[rafifreak00]

Well, if you're telling me to "dont do it" about the iMac... ehh a bit too late.

About the RAM- I found out that PC133 in fact is compatible, but I won't be getting those two 512's for $90 each... I'll find some offer on eBay instead.

For the hard drive, I hear that 120GB is the maximum compatible inside an iMac G3? Is this true?

 

[echeck]

Just last week I got a Bondi Blue iMac G3 233Mhz for free from a lady at work who said it didn't work anymore. I thought I would take a shot at seeing if I could fix it, so I take it home, plug it in and it powers right up. No problems whatsoever, and rather zippy running OS 8.5.

It's pretty barebones with only 64 megs of RAM. I've read that some models will accept up to 512MB, but it's a crapshoot. It seems most will only support 384MB of RAM.

Anyway, my point to the OP is that ebay is definitely the way to go for RAM for these babies. I'll be buying a couple sticks soon to upgrade mine, and then I'll put OS X on there. I hope she can handle it!

Good find on your iMac though, I would have jumped on that too.

 

[frankblundt]

2x512 PC133 is fine in the slot loading iMacs - just get low density non-ecc

you can put larger than 120GB drives in there but it will only format/see 128GB (a 120GB drive formats to about 111GB so if you're desperate for space a 160GB will give you an extra 17GB)

You can have large drives as externals tho (as long as the enclosure supports large drives) - it's a limitation of the ATA IDE controller in the pre-MDD Macs.

If you're patient you can sometimes pick up airport cards and adaptors for iMacs quite cheap second hand.

 

[California]

I put 1gig of ram in my mom's (now my sisters) iMac G3 500mhz.
And then I put a 120gb 7200 hard drive in it.

Instead of an airport card, she has a 100 foot ethernet cord! (Cost 30 bucks at Fry's)

PC 133 168pin ram is fine. You don't need the PC100 ram; harder to get anyway.

That iMac runs TIGER FAST, TOO BTW.

 

[rafifreak00]

Great news...

1) I found a 160GB internal IDE hard drive lying around my house and I threw that into my iMac and whaddya know? 128GB. Wow.

2) I pulled out two 256MB PC133 RAM sticks from some old desktop computers I had stashed in my storage room and I tossed those into my iMac- work like a charm and applications run a bit smoother now.

Lucky, eh?

*still amazed at myself*