SillyDog701

by **Mandrake** » Fri 04 Jul, 2003 4:38 pm

A friend offered to sell me his old Mac for $200 (the box, mouse, keyboard, monitor etc)... My Question is Can this run Mac OS X? The Machine is a Power Macintosh 8600/300 with 512mb of ram (8x64mb he told me) and the video memory updated to 4mb (from 2mb).

Pic of this mac:

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by **DJGM** » Fri 04 Jul, 2003 7:22 pm

Look at Apple's recommended system requirements for Mac OS X
over at: http://apple.com/uk/macosx/upgrade/requirements.html

If that Power Macintosh has a G3 processor, then yes, you will be
able to run Mac OS X on it. If it isn't G3, then the highest Mac OS
version you'll be able to run on that machine in Mac OS 9.2.2 . . .

Also, if the machine has a suitable CPU, make sure the HDD has
at least 1.5GB of free space to install Mac OS X. That machine's
got a decent enough amount of RAM, for Mac OS X, so as long
as it has a G3 CPU, and lots of HDD space, you will hopefully
have no problem running Mac OS X on it . . .

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by **Mandrake** » Fri 04 Jul, 2003 11:04 pm

Hmmm, a 9gb HD no problems with hard drive space or memory, but the CPU I'm wondering about . . . I found out it's a G4 overdrive upgrade thing... Running at 9x the bus, so 450mhz G4. It's all good :-)

I've heard that there are some compatability issues with Mac OS 'Jaguar', but a thing can be downloaded to fix these issues or somethin'. The machine was running OS 9.2.something with no problems, so lemee just hope this works . . . !

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by **DJGM** » Fri 04 Jul, 2003 11:34 pm

I don't think you're gonna like the sound of this, but Mac OS X doesn't support G4 upgrade cards, and
assuming that's what this particular Mac has got, it seems unlikely you'll be able to run Mac OS X on it.

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by **Mandrake** » Sat 05 Jul, 2003 2:49 am

Bumma! I thought I had scored myself a good fast Mac with plenty of ram that could run OS X, are you certain of this?

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by **DJGM** » Sat 05 Jul, 2003 9:53 am

I've spoken with someone who knows a lot more than I do about Macintosh computers, and
they've said that if you can find out the name of manufacturers of the G4 upgrade card, you
should able to download patches from their website, and you may be able to run Mac OS X.

Even after that, if you do manage to sucessfully install Mac OS X, it'll run a lot slower than it
would on a new flat panel G4 iMac, as there'll be no video acceleration, but the high amount
of RAM installed in that old Mac could partially compensate for the lack of video accelaration.

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by **Mandrake** » Sat 05 Jul, 2003 8:11 pm

I spoke with my friend, he is going to track down the vendor of the upgrade/overdrive processor. I asked him why he wants to sell his old faithful Mac... cuz he is getting one of those fancy G4 Cubes!

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by **smileyme** » Sun 03 Aug, 2003 7:44 am

Hey Mandrake,

I know this is a bit late, but I'm new to this forum, so forgive me.

The upgraded 8600 is a great machine, and will run Jaguar fine with the help of XPostFacto.

I have a dozen Legacy Macs of various flavors, all running Jaguar.

Rick : )

EDIT by DJGM:
Info about XPostFacto can be found here.

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by **AYoung2084** » Mon 04 Aug, 2003 10:06 am

Mandrake wrote:Hmmm, a 9gb HD no problems with hard drive space or memory, but the CPU I'm wondering about . . . I found out it's a G4 overdrive upgrade thing... Running at 9x the bus, so 450mhz G4. It's all good I've heard that there are some compatability issues with Mac OS 'Jaguar', but a thing can be downloaded to fix these issues or somethin'. The machine was running OS 9.2.something with no problems, so lemee just hope this works . . . !

Sounds like a very nice and cheap bit of kit which will do good work for you for a few years. 9Gb is not a bad HD size but my only bit of advice would be to partition it into 4.5 and 4.5 HFS Plus or "Extended" format. Back-up everything first on CD-ROM or Zip etc. as this means a clean install of everything. Say HD-1 with OS9 and OSX and HD-2 with just OS-9. Put a minimal OS9 system on the second partition. If anything goes wrong on your primary partition you can boot up on the secondary one instead and fix the problem more quickly. Norton, Tech Tools, Disk Warrior etc. are good at fixing things and should be kept on both partitions. Run the application from the partition with the active boot system and no problem with it. Disk optimisation can also work like this by switching "start-up disk" (really start-up partition) and optimise the disk partition without the boot system or running optimisation application. Back up files can also be kept on the other partition. This should prevent most nastiness with loss of data short of a terminally catastrophic event happening to the drive.

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by **Mac_Fanatic** » Tue 13 Jan, 2004 1:45 pm

I actually have an 8600/300/512ram/30gb hd running jaguar via XPOSTFACTO with a G3/400 Sonnet card installed and it runs flawless and quick as all get out. For it's age it's a speedy machine.
However, $200.00 is a bit to ask for a stock 8600/300. If you hop over the lowendmac.com and join thier swap forum that machine usually sells for about $45-60 dollars. I purchased am 8600/300 for $50 and a G3/300/128/6gb MT for $98.50 including shipping.

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by **Josh** » Wed 14 Jan, 2004 11:37 pm

What's an upgrade card? Is it like upgrading a P3 to a P4 or a P4 to a AMD Athlon XP chip?

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by **DJGM** » Wed 14 Jan, 2004 11:58 pm

Something like that yes. If a Mac came with a G3 processor, such as an old Power Macintosh G3
(but not the old G3 iMac) you can install a special card that has a G4 processor hardwired onto it.

That's to the best of my knowledge anyway!

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SillyDog701

Maybe one of the MAC gurus could help me here . . . ?

Maybe one of the MAC gurus could help me here . . . ?

Have to agree with SmileyMe

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