Diane Stinnett <usafdesigner at insightbb.com> wrote: > My daughter got a new (to her) beige G3 for Christmas, and we would > like to install 10.2 on it.
I have a Beige G3 ex-266 Desktop running 10.2.3 perfectly, but it is heavily upgraded and still has some inherent limitations. It did it a year ago, so it is hard to remember all the details. First, I replaced the original 4GB drive with a 40GB drive, by opening up the machine and putting the new hard drive in place of the CD drive so I could format and partition it. In the partitioning, I was aware that on a Beige G3, the OSX partition has to be the first and under 8MB. Then I dragged everything from my old partitions to my new partitions and made sure I could boot and run from the new drive OK. After that, I put the new hard drive in place of the old hard drive. Next I got a Sonnett G3/500 MHz processor. I got a G3 because it was as fast as a G4/500, but cheaper, and did not require any software patch like the G4 did. It plugged right in where the old processor had been. When the computer did not boot, I learned from Sonnett that there is a hidden reset button on the motherboard that has to be pressed to make the new processor work. Then I maxed out the all the RAM slots with three low-profile 256MB sticks of SDRAM for a total of 768MB, and a 4MB stick of VRAM for a total of 6MB. To help with new peripherals, I installed PCI cards for USB and FireWire. Connected are two printers (laser LocalTalk and photo USB), two scanners (flat SCSI and film USB), two CD-RWs (USB and FireWire), two modems (Ethernet cable and dialup phone), an external drive (SCSI), and a multi-USB hub. Then I installed OS 10.1 and am up to 10.2.3 now. It works super. OSX with the 500 MHz processor feels like OS9 did with the 266 MHz processor. The limitations arise from OSX not supporting some things on the Beige machinery, such as SCSI, LocalTalk and floppy drive. For those, I have to boot in OS9 (not Classic, which uses OSX for networking). Allan Atherton | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
