G3 AIO

Found an orphan G3 headed for the landfill so we attempting a rescue. The G3 AIO was a hybrid machine, a missing link in the evolutionary chain from the beige macs to the new colorful imacs and clamshells. It has the same innards as the beige G3 but in a strange 60s alien shaped case. It has a 15È monitor like the imac but with a long tube so it takes more desk space. It uses abd connectors and has 2 serial ports and a scsi port.

Taken it apart is done by removing 4 screws at the back and sliding open a tray - works in a drawer...like the beige and blue and white g3s the cpu uses a zif socket so moving the metal cross bar enables you to remove the existing 233mhz cpu. We found a 266mhz one in the box o cpu parts, (which also has some rare 40mhz 040s). This will do until we can get a faster one, i think the AIO tops out at about 450mhz. The board runs at 66mhz and uses pc-66 ram. The next step is to pry up the orange jumper stick on j16, thowing away the warning label on top. Just like the beige and bw macs you can set the cpu speed via jumpers. I overclocked it to 300 for now. The jumper pins are close together so you need small thing jumpers.

Replace the existing sdram 32mb stick with some more ram. It will take 256mb sticks, 3 in total. pc-100 ram will usually work. It also has 3 pci slots for usb or firewire. Found a sgram stick on an ati mach 64 video card and put that in to bring the ram up to 6gig. woo woo!

The ide hard drive is only 4gig so that will have to be replaced.

also the battery was dead so found a size half aa 3.6 volg tl-2150 as a replacement.

system booted ok up to a cd of 9.2 in the optical. installed and rebooted and setup the network. The onboard nic is only 10mb i think so will have to find a farallon card.

with some more ram and a hd disk with 2 partiions, 1 8gig this can run 10.2 natively but it makes a useful os9 machine.

i cant seem to post photos here anymore so ill create a facebook pic album for the vintage computer group there