On Wednesday, December 25, 2002, at 09:45 PM, Diane Stinnett wrote: > My daughter got a new (to her) beige G3 for Christmas, and we would > like to install 10.2 on it. In the read me for Jaguar, it says > something about a possible firmware update for these machines. How can > I find out if I need this, or any other information aout upgrading > that computer. I don't fine Apple's website very user-friendly.
I don't think the firmware in the beige G3 is software upgradable. There were basically three versions of the firmware called different things. You can find out which you have by looking at the System Profiler with Mac OS 9. Rev A (or 1) = $77D.40F2 Rev B (or 2) = $77D.45F1 Rev C (or 3) = $77D.45F2 If there is a necessary firmware updater for your machine, it should be on the Jaguar boot CD. You can buy Rev C firmware chips on eBay. I installed Jaguar on a Rev B machine last week. To get it to install correctly I had to unplug all the third party devices -- keyboard and Zip drive. I also reset the machine's PRAM by pressing the hardware reset button on the mainboard, although I don't know whether that was necessary. After the install, it seems to be working all right, except that the hard drive doesn't go to sleep. The G3/266 is no speed demon with Jaguar. I'm getting the feeling that all the programmers at Apple have dual G4 gigahertz machines with an infinite amount of RAM. Mac OS 9 and Linux are a lot snappier on the machine than Jaguar. I think it might be a good idea to make a few of them work with Bondi blue iMacs. -- Lee Larson, Mathematics Department, University of Louisville Phone: 502-852-6826 FAX: 502-852-7132 The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be January 28. For more information about the LCS, go to <http://www.kymac.org>.
