I just bought an imac g3 approx ~8 years old from a friend for $20. I'm using it for the kids to tool around with. Everything works great, except that when they play internet games of watching internet based videos, its slows up. I'm trying to find out if upgrading the ram will help solve this problem (currently has 192mb of RAM) or is a video card issue. I'm running OS X. This is the first time I'm using a mac :Thanks for any suggestions.
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speeding up internet video on imac g3
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its probably Flash which isnt optimised to its fullest yet on OS X. what OS version are you running? go to http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash to get the latest version and select Power PC from the drop down menu.
Flash is very poorly optimized for OS X like richthomas said. You will need more CPU power for that. However, more RAM would be a big help since your running OS X. I can't say for sure if it will make it 100% smooth though.
sometimes when you're playing flash games or watch flash videos, you can right click (if you have one mouse button use control+click) directly on the game/video to set the quality to low, medium or high. Of course put it on low and that can speed things up a little. I had to do that on my older iMac.
Unfortunately, flash isn't written very well for Macs. And because of that it is ungodly CPU intensive for Macs, for example my iMac (specs in sig) will hit 50-75% CPU usage when watching youtube videos for a few minutes, but when watching 720p quicktime videos I rarely break 10% CPU usage. The G3's really can't handle flash, but it is looking like the next release of flash for Macs will greatly improve performance. All you can do is wait.
Also please don't base your opinion of Macs on that 8 year old machine. It was revolutionary 8-10 years ago, but now isn't really useful for much. Remember, 8 years ago most websites didn't have a drop of flash on them, now web designers are making whole websites out of flash (even though there is no need to.
Good luck!
Don
Also please don't base your opinion of Macs on that 8 year old machine. It was revolutionary 8-10 years ago, but now isn't really useful for much. Remember, 8 years ago most websites didn't have a drop of flash on them, now web designers are making whole websites out of flash (even though there is no need to.
Good luck!
Don
I have an iMac G3 350Mhz that I have Tiger installed on. It runs iPhoto, iWeb, and Safari pretty slowly. DVDs chug along with stuttering. I wouldn't expect to do much Flash on it, still chugs on mine with 384 megabytes of RAM.
I bought mine about a year ago for $40 off Craigslist and upgraded with a DVD-ROM. Great for experimenting with OS X before buying a full-fledged Mac, but not really the full experience since it can't run much of the modern software.
I bought mine about a year ago for $40 off Craigslist and upgraded with a DVD-ROM. Great for experimenting with OS X before buying a full-fledged Mac, but not really the full experience since it can't run much of the modern software.
1. Remove hard drive.
2. Remove logic board.
3. Remove power supply.
4. Install 300 watt micro ATX power supply.
5. Install micro ATX logic board with Intel Core 2 Duo processor and NVidia 8600GT.
6. Install SATA hard drive.
7. Install Kalyway 10.5.2.
You're done!
2. Remove logic board.
3. Remove power supply.
4. Install 300 watt micro ATX power supply.
5. Install micro ATX logic board with Intel Core 2 Duo processor and NVidia 8600GT.
6. Install SATA hard drive.
7. Install Kalyway 10.5.2.
You're done!
That's a bit much for a kid's computer don't you think? You could buy a used iMac G5 or possibly even a early Intel iMac for that much.
Don
It's about the only solution for videos on that Mac. Even a G4 upgrade wouldn't be sufficient, particularly for h.264 decoding. Parts-wise, it'd be about $225 or so if you went with Intel's Atom cpu/mobo, then you'd have to buy a copy of Leopard.