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Someone gave me a dual G4 450 mhz. . .tiger? ram? drives?

tonywalker23

tonywalker23

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 21, 2003
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1,851
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someone gave me a dual G4 450 mhz powermac (gigabit ethernet). i know very little about macs hardware wise. it only has a dvd drive. can i take my dvd read/cd burner out of my pc and put it in the G4? does ram from a pc work in a G4 as long as it is pc100?
also i put panther on it fine but it keeps freezing at different points when i tried to put tiger on it . . . could this be because it only has 128 mb of ram or could something else be causing this?
and one of the drive doors on the front is missing. any sites that sale parts like this would help too.
thanks
tony walker
www.preachertony.com
 
I found that macs ar ebest used with atleast 512mb RAM, anythign else and it would not work as good. What would you be using this mac for? if we (i) know how and what you will use the mac for we (i) could give you better advice.
 
If you can afford it, put 1GB of ram in. If you are unsure of the type of ram your mac needs, use the memory locator at Crucial.com. Do not order it through the memory locator though, as you pay extra for the guarantee that it works. Providing you write down exactly what type of ram you need you can save money finding it manually.

I saved £40 on my Powerbooks 1 GB stick doing it this way. Like Solafaa said, if you explain what you want to use it for we should be able to tell you exactly how much ram you want, but generally the maximum you can afford is best :)

Your PC optical drive should work fine, providing tiger has the right drivers (which there is a very good chance of!).

Congratulations on blagging a Mac!
 
i daily just browse, email, use itunes and ical . . .
once a week i record a radio broadcast (by the way, which is also uploaded as a podcast, preachertony.com) using Sound Studio from felt tip software. Usually my aiff i work with to make the broadcast is about 75 MB (15 min long, mono)
i already use a powerbook 12" 867 mhz, 640 mb ram, tiger. i would just like to use the powermac for what i use my powerbook for.
i unplugged the zip drive that was in it because i dont have a need for it. can i just plug an spare HD i had lying around where the zip drive was, or is it not that simple.
 
Just make sure you have 512mb ram and a bigger hard drive and it will run tiger just fine....

SHadoW :cool:
 
you should be able to plug in the HD to where the zip drive was. as long as the jumpers are set properly on the HD. then you will probably have to open disk utilities and reformat the drive as i am guessing you got it from a windows machine. as for Tiger, as people have been mentioning MORE RAM!! The minimum requirment for Tiger is 256 MB of RAM, from apple's website. my little bro runs tiger on his mini with only 256, it run, but if you have more than one program open it deffinitly slows down (i think it runs pretty slow on 256 compared to my PB) so id go with at least 512 to be comfortable. your PC ram may work, as long as it is the same type that the powermac uses. Macs can be much more picky about ram than PCs can be. hope you enjoy your new machine!!
 
tonywalker23 said:
someone gave me a dual G4 450 mhz powermac (gigabit ethernet). i know very little about macs hardware wise. it only has a dvd drive. can i take my dvd read/cd burner out of my pc and put it in the G4?
Click to expand...
www.xlr8yourmac.com is a valuable resource for upgrading optical drives. See if anyone has had success using your make and model 'combo' drive.

does ram from a pc work in a G4 as long as it is pc100?
Click to expand...
The G4 gigabit Ethernet uses PC100 ram. http://www.apple-history.com/frames/g4giga.html
 
Yes you can use 'PC' RAM. Crucial is probably the most expensive place to buy memory. There really isn't any need to spend that much. Check out ramseeker.com, they track prices from a number of outlets. 1-800-4-memory is usually the cheapest. They're good, I've bought plenty of chips from them.
 
^ True. Any PC100 ram module will do.

If there's PC100 in your old PC, you *should* be able to swap it out.


Sorry for the double-post.
 
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