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Upgrading RAM in a Rev. A iMac G3

EvieSigma

Young ThinkPad Apprentice
68020
I just came into possession of a Rev. A iMac G3 that clearly hasn't been upgraded at all...I plan to fix that. My question is, how picky is it going to be about RAM? All I have right now in the PC100 SODIMM department is a pair of 64MB half-height SODIMMs marked "Synch, 100MHz, CL2". Anyone know if these sticks will work? 128MB of RAM would certainly be a nice upgrade over 32MB.

 
Well I installed that RAM (and also a nice 7200rpm 40GB hard drive) and I'm having a problem I can't figure out...it boots normally like it should, but if I try and hold down C to boot from CD I just get a blank purple screen and it doesn't boot the CD. Any ideas as to what could be wrong? 

EDIT-turns out my 8.6 CD just isn't bootable on this machine for some reason. It boots off a 9.0 CD just fine. How weird...is the 8.6 image from Macintosh Garden just not bootable?

 
It didn't say it was a specific model...I just used an iMac 8.1 disk for the initial install and then 8.6 on top of that.

 
128 MB would be a fine upgrade for an iMac, especially if you plan to run any version of OS X!

I once had OSX 10.1.4 installed on my Rev. C iMac, which only had 32 MB of RAM, and it was S-L-O-W-!

It took like 10 minutes and tons of disk thrashing just to get to the desktop!

And if you want 8.6, it'd probably be easier to somehow obtain an 8.5 disk (or, even better, an install/restore disk set from a Rev. B or C iMac, which came stock with 8.5), install that, and then run the 8.6 updater. I don't think it'll work straight on 8.1.

Also, to my knowledge, there was no "retail" installer for 8.6, only system-specific ones (Rev. D iMac, very early Slot Loaders and iBooks, PowerBook G3 Lombard, early Sawtooths (I just discovered that apparently, the earliest Sawtooths came stock with 8.5. Can anyone confirm?)). I guess the standard way was to install 8.5 and then run the updater.

c

 
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