My brother-in-law gave us an older Dell tower with a P4 1Ghz processor.  I started messing about with different variants of Linux.  I tried Puppy Linux and Dreamlinux, both of which installed easily and seemed to run fine on this old machine.  They worked OK but it felt unfamiliar.  I became frustrated.  And another machine was beckoning…

Enter: Strawberry iMac DV sporting a 400Mhz G3 processor and a Barbie-pink exterior.  This old beauty was purchased as an open-box special at Sears (the orginal buyer said it was “too pink”) and was our first official venture into the world of Macintosh.  I fired it up, and found an install of Xubuntu loading, and then asking me to log in.  Hmm.  No username that I can recall.  Guess this was a prior experiment with Linux that I had given up on.

I dug up the old copy of Panther which had been running on it previously and proceeded to re-install.  (Note to self: Make sure the hard drive is formatted for HFS+, or else OS X’s installer won’t see the drive.)  OS X loaded fine, and the machine booted up and asked me to register (yawn).  Once that exercise was completed I opened Safari.  Web pages open .. a .. bit .. more .. slowly… but it’s passable.  This will make a handy eBay machine.

Junk in basement + computer in basement + CALC’s Auction Listing Creator and I’m up and running for listing some junk on eBay.  I added Opera, Camino and Shiira for good measure, since I am looking to maximise the performance of this old machine.  Interestingly enough I’m finding that Safari performs as well or better than these other browsers, and I’m forced to use Safari anyway due to my use of Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets.  I’m thinking this old machine isn’t going to run OpenOffice.

Since this is my first venture into Networking the machines, I’m not sure what to expect. A preliminary test of file sharing resulted in a pleasant surprise, though. After enabling FTP in OS X’s Sharing preferences, I was easily able to find the other Mac on my network by simply clicking Go->Network.  The other machine showed right up; I logged in as the user of that machine, and Bam! I have a network drive on my desktop.  Too easy!

Looking for an old iMac to mess about with?  They’re going pretty cheap on eBay lately.  Remember performance is going to be so-so, compared to a modern machine, but with a good bit of memory (they’ll support up to 1GB of PC100 RAM) they’ll run OS X up through 10.4 Tiger decently.