new to mac

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new to mac

sorry if this is not the right forum but the names are not terribly discriptive

hi I am totaly new to macs. my sister and brother in law are crazy in to them. they decorated thier house with the empty boxes from there stuff. anyway they just gave me an imac the one from around 1998 the color ones. anyway i know nothing about it. I would like to get the newest opporating system on it, the tiger thing. is thatpossible?? also i'm a graphic design student and my real hope is to be able to run the adobe creative suite on it. if anyone knows if that could ever work i'd appreciate your knowlege. and i plan on getting the new 20 inch imac but i don't have that kind of money at the moment.

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Unless your Mac has Firewire,

Unless your Mac has Firewire, the Tiger installer won't let it install, although you can install Tiger on the hard drive by taking it out and puting it into someother case and using another Mac to install Tiger onto the hard drive. But I don't know if you'll be ready for that.

1998 Macs could only handle 512MB of RAM or 1GB if you're lucky. It would be better to install something like Jaguar or Panther (OS 10.2 and 10.3 respectively) if you wanted to be running Creative suite on it.

Your best bet might be to wait until you get your 20" iMac.

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Here's the Specs on your iMac

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/stats/imac_266.html

It's possible to run OS X on your iMac, but it would be very slow even if you max out the RAM.

Before installing OS X, you may need to upgrade the Firmware (Boot Rom version). This is done BEFORE the OS X install using OS 9.
Mac OS Secret Available firmware updates
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86117

Here are the requirements for Panther & Tiger.

OS 10. 4 Tiger requirements
http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.html

OS 10.3 Panther requirements
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106163

Cheers, Tom
Mac Troubleshooting, Maintenance & Tips
http://www.geocities.com/texas_macman/MacTroubleshoot.html

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XPostFacto = Greatest Mac Tool *EVER*

You *CAN* use Tiger on it, but a few things need to be done first.
You will most likely need to get the CD-Rom version first, unless you want to hunt down and install a DVD-Rom drive in place of the internal. Remember, the internal CD is a laptop drive with an adapter. All you have to do is take the adapter off the old one, and attach it to the Laptop DVD Rom.
Second, you will need an OS 9 at LEAST, this will be used for XPostFacto
to install Tiger. I recommend doing the updates to 9.2.2 if at all possible. And like Texas Mac Man said, you will want to install ANY Firmware Updates there are for the machine. If you don't have them in, you can *potentially* kill the Machine.
When you get XPostFacto on the machine, you will want to put in the CD/DVD of tiger, and open the application. when you get it open, go to the firmware options (not sure, you will have to look around, since I am not at a machine that I can open it on) and make sure that verbose mode is check (You will want this for troubleshooting) and "Use Old NVRAMS" or something like that.
Get out of that box, and then go to the main. Click on the CD/DVD, then click the hard drive you want to install to (make sure the partition you are installing on is about 7.5GB or less [to be safe]!!!) Click "Install OS X"
restart, and when you do the install, for options, make sure the first option is checked for install. Then proceed with the install.

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CDs vs DVDs

Panther 10.3 comes on CDs. Tiger 10.4 comes on DVDs, however, after you buy Tiger, you can get it on CDs for about $10-15 extra from Apple. Panther will cost less than Tiger.

If you want to run OS X, get Panther or Tiger & not earlier versions. I would recommend Panther.

Cheers, Tom

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