iMac G4 Snowball issues

[glinda]

My IMac G4 Snowball PowerPc G4 with OSX 10.4.11 is sluggish. Am petitioned with OS9 because I have Photoshop Suite there with Illustrator, etc...I hate PhotoStudio for stuff.
What I want to know is I have been thinking about taking it in for what is called a "wipe clean". Will I loose all my stuff on OS9? Can I do a clean at home in any way. I am sure there is tons of misc. crap on my computer that are left overs from removing Programs or whatever.
Am also thinking about upgrading to the new Snow leopard or whatever creature they call it now.
Need advise please. Am on a fairly limited budget. Not rich at all.

My key board seems to be giving me issues or rather the mouse also. Gets stuck a lot and wonder if Ebay is the best place to replace these units. Any help on these issues would be helpful
Thankx

[comtec]

1. I'm surpised im the only one posting...

let me get all my pc vs snark out of the way first
*SNARK*

ok that's out of my system.
Pretty much anything that is USB will work on the Mac - go nuts :)

Next, you should buy an external hard driver and drag all your stuff to it, perhaps two. One for OS 9 one for OSX.

it's possible your problem is that your internal hard drive is dying. I got a imac from a client once, because I helped him upgrade. I got his bandy blue which was ishing. The problem turned out to simply be the hard drive was dying on him, and going very sloooooooowwly.

I opened up the clam shell, ripped out the old hard drive tossed in a new - standard IDE 40-pin - hard drive, and BOOM it was good to go. Oh yeah the CD-ROMs are just standard laptop CD-ROM drives. very cheap at the local "junk shop" - my loving term for old computer parts stores.

My two cents is that you need to replace your hard drive. Get a bigger one, they're cheap enough.
Then you will need to partition it, as you have now.
then move everything back onto the assorted partitions and you should be good t go.

at least on a OS9 box that should be the case - one good thing i'll say about the old OS set-up was that it was easy to migrate hard drives.

While you have your iMac open anyway, i highly suggest replacing the memory with MORE! (oh wait RAM is on the bottom... nevermind - add more RAM anyway, it never hurts)

Anyway once you have replaced the drive (it really isn't that hard, directions are all over the internet on how to do this) and moved your data back on from the external(s) you should be good to go.

I'd say don't wipe the external drives for at least a month. If nothing goes wrong after a months, wipe them and store music, movies, porn, whatever and enjoy :)

HISTORICAL (and snarky) NOTE:
Even way back in the days of the iMac, apple was using standard PC parts. The RAM is standard SRDAM as I recall. Dirt cheap now a days if you can find it. The hard drives are standard IDEs - apple stopped using SCSI in the mid 90's when jobs came back. The CD-ROMs are standard PC laptop units.
I don't know what are you live in, but I'd say you should be able to replace the hard drive for around 50/60 dollars, plus 100 dollars for the USB hard drives.
Is that seems like a lot, and you don't have any external drives, or friends who can load you drives, then I'd say, just buy a USB hard drive, and plop everything on that. Chances are that anything you buy - even dirt cheapest - is going to have vastly more storage space than your current hard drive. and because of how mobile the Mac OS is/was you should be able to simply set that as your boot drive, and poof,you're done. you may still want to go in and disable your internal hard drive once you do this because it will still slow down your system even if you aren't using it for anything.

Anyway, good luck! Hope that helps :)

[glinda]

2. Thank you for your help!

[alfredo]

3. Keyboard and mouse first. Pick up keyboard, turn upside down and shake.

Clean the mouse real good.

Go to Disk utility in Applications/Utility and Repair permissions, and then verify the disk.

After that is over and if you drive passes, do this:

Go to Applications/Utilities and open the terminal.

Type at the prompt:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

hit the return and type in your password. Hit return and wait or do something else. It will take a bit of time.

What this does is run some scripts to clean caches and clean up files. If you keep your Mac on over night it does it automatically, if not you do it manually.

Do that command every few weeks. All you will need to do when you open your terminal is to hit the up arrow until that command shows.

Now sit back and bask in the knowledge that you ran your first UNIX command.


BTW, More RAM is always a good idea.

How full is your drive? In that Utility folder the first item should be "Activity Monitor." Open it and you will see at the bottom some options. Hit Disk Usage.

[MagickMuffin]

4. Something you need to be aware of if you're thinking of upgrading to Leopard

And that is you will no longer have Classic OS 9. Also Snow Leopard will not work on your machine it is only for intels.


If you plan on replacing the internal hard drive be sure to have someone who can help you. We replaced ours and believe me it takes two people. But the benefits were worth it.

[moggie]

5. Why does it take two people?

I did mine, alone, back when I still used an iMac G4, and I don't recall any particular difficulty.

[MagickMuffin]

6. It just helps to have two people ;=D

He was the Doctor, I was the Nurse assistant :o

Hubby could have done it by himself, but I held the flashlight and make sure he put it back together again, as he left out a screw and I noticed it. "Doctor there is a screw you missed." :o

We installed the hard drive and a faster dvd recorder. The swivel screen also was an issue, as it needed a lot of protection.

Good too know you were able to do it all by yourself.

[moggie]

7. You're right, it helps to have two pairs of eyes

"You forgot the thermal goop, idiot!"
"Careful of that wire"
"That doesn't go there"

With one person, you just need to be your own critic, and take more care. Fortunately, it's not one of those jobs where you need three hands.