oneboyarmy
Well-known member
I was the only bidder on a recent eBay auction for a Flower Power iMac G3. I got a push notification that the auction was ending in 15 minutes and still had no bids. The listing didn't go into a ton of detail about the specs on the machine, but it looked great in the photos and the seller has great feedback. I didn't think I'd win, but here we are!
It arrived Saturday morning and by evening I got it unboxed, powered up and decided to see what my lucky bid got me. To start, it felt like opening a time capsule. It looks like it was powered off for the last 10 years, with the last few documents being modified in January of 2005.
I opened System Profiler and started looking around... and it's running OS 9.0.4, has 128MB of RAM and 8MB Rage Pro video, a DVD-ROM drive and a 30GB hard drive. Definitely wasn't right on the specs for a Flower Power. Booting into Open Firmware advised me it was a PowerMac2,2. A quick peek in MacTracker and a Google search later confirmed my suspicion, this was not exactly the iMac I was looking for. Bummer. Is the slightly lesser CPU (750 versus 750cx) and lesser graphics really going to ruin my whole world? Probably not. I'm still very happy with it now that my mystery is over!
The firmware is still on a 3.x version and will need to be updated along with setting up a clean OS. I threw in the soundtrack CD from The Fellowship of the Ring to test the optical drive and was really impressed by how good the audio quality is. I'd never used a G3 series iMac for more than a few minutes back when they were new so I had no idea what to expect.
It arrived Saturday morning and by evening I got it unboxed, powered up and decided to see what my lucky bid got me. To start, it felt like opening a time capsule. It looks like it was powered off for the last 10 years, with the last few documents being modified in January of 2005.
I opened System Profiler and started looking around... and it's running OS 9.0.4, has 128MB of RAM and 8MB Rage Pro video, a DVD-ROM drive and a 30GB hard drive. Definitely wasn't right on the specs for a Flower Power. Booting into Open Firmware advised me it was a PowerMac2,2. A quick peek in MacTracker and a Google search later confirmed my suspicion, this was not exactly the iMac I was looking for. Bummer. Is the slightly lesser CPU (750 versus 750cx) and lesser graphics really going to ruin my whole world? Probably not. I'm still very happy with it now that my mystery is over!
The firmware is still on a 3.x version and will need to be updated along with setting up a clean OS. I threw in the soundtrack CD from The Fellowship of the Ring to test the optical drive and was really impressed by how good the audio quality is. I'd never used a G3 series iMac for more than a few minutes back when they were new so I had no idea what to expect.