using a Mac for the first time

zagubov

You've got a nearly- ten-year old mac (full details here). It's not as obsolete as some think. You might need to need to upgrade it to Snow Leopard or maybe Lion, probably for about £20.

Will run Facetime, Spotify, Skype, Dropbox, browsers like Firefox, Torch, Roccat, Opera, Stainless, (and Chrome, though you won't keep getting more updates) and office products like the free ones on this very forum and MS Office 2004 -2011 (miss out 2008). I doubt you'll need antivirus. I think you can get extra memory for it, but unless your work has a mac technician I don't know if it's worth trying to fit it (youtube is your friend).

You'll still find printers that work with it.
Don't be put off by the age too much. Macs were about at their peak for user-friendliness and usefulness around about then. As this is a money-saving site, I'm not going to suggest buying a new one as readily as other posters might!

Roland_Sausage

zagubov wrote: »

You've got a nearly- ten-year old mac (full details here). It's not as obsolete as some think. You might need to need to upgrade it to Snow Leopard or maybe Lion, probably for about £20.

Will run Facetime, Spotify, Skype, Dropbox, browsers like Firefox, Torch, Roccat, Opera, Stainless, (and Chrome, though you won't keep getting more updates) and office products like the free ones on this very forum and MS Office 2004 -2011 (miss out 2008). I doubt you'll need antivirus. I think you can get extra memory for it, but unless your work has a mac technician I don't know if it's worth trying to fit it (youtube is your friend).

You'll still find printers that work with it.
Don't be put off by the age too much. Macs were about at their peak for user-friendliness and usefulness around about then. As this is a money-saving site, I'm not going to suggest buying a new one as readily as other posters might!

Without a RAM upgrade, this machine isn't going to support anything newer than Leopard. Snow Leopard needs 1GB and Lion 2GB.

Even if they were to upgrade the RAM, they can't upgrade directly from Tiger to Snow Leopard or Lion. It would need wiped and a clean install done.

No chance of running Spotify, it needs Mavericks. Same with the latest version of Firefox, although they might be able to get an older version.

I know this is a money saving site and everything, but you have to accept that this 10 year old machine is only really fit for a bit of occasional nostalgic use and not for any serious purposes. It's had it.

paddyrg

Money saving isn't necessarily about capital outlay - if a page that loads instantly for me takes 30s to render, then what might be an hour's work could be 2 hours on an old box. It doesn't take too many £7.20s before you've bought a new bottom end laptop, and even that will out perform a decade-old anything. Personally, I'd still suggest spending more to get an SSD for power and performance, it's a remarkable difference (I can do a full reboot in seconds and battery lasts twice as long!)

zagubov

OP what are you using it for? emails?writing/printing/ whatever? And what software have you already got?

If you desperately want to buy a newer computer, so be it. My default setting is always suggest the cheapest way forward.

As Roland says, if you want to run anything more than Office 2004/8 or Adobe Suite 3 you'll need to boost the RAM to at least 1Gb. If you're left stuck with Tiger, it'll be like the Stone Age, and Leopard's not much better. The faster browser that might run might be Firefox 3.6.28 .
Boost it to Snow Leopard or Lion and you could run
Spotify 0.8.5
Dropbox 2.10.52
Skype for mac 6.15
Firefox ESR (English version)

Just google for what you need; the internet's very mac-friendly and people expect to use their macs very much longer than they use their PCs. On the other hand if you want to edit videos or play computer games, as Roland says, move on.

It will cost hundreds to buy an updated mac, and ebay would be the MSE way to go for that. Obviously register with Auctionsniper or similar and use one of your free trial snipes to make sure you secure the item.

I_have_spoken

That iMac is worth what you paid for it!

wba31

Roland_Sausage wrote: »

Without a RAM upgrade, this machine isn't going to support anything newer than Leopard. Snow Leopard needs 1GB and Lion 2GB.

Even if they were to upgrade the RAM, they can't upgrade directly from Tiger to Snow Leopard or Lion. It would need wiped and a clean install done.

No chance of running Spotify, it needs Mavericks. Same with the latest version of Firefox, although they might be able to get an older version.

I know this is a money saving site and everything, but you have to accept that this 10 year old machine is only really fit for a bit of occasional nostalgic use and not for any serious purposes. It's had it.

If it were mine I'd do this (I'd pop 8GB in, did this in my MacBook despite it "only taking 4GB" and it loved it) Dropped an SSD in and it's like a new machine, so I'd be looking for a small SSD off Crucial

Dill

Thanks for all your input. I'm going to show this thread to my friend who's a lot more au fait with how computers work than I am, though he's not a Mac expert and never uses one!

zagubov wrote: »

OP what are you using it for? emails?writing/printing/ whatever? And what software have you already got?

If you desperately want to buy a newer computer, so be it. My default setting is always suggest the cheapest way forward.

As Roland says, if you want to run anything more than Office 2004/8 or Adobe Suite 3 you'll need to boost the RAM to at least 1Gb. If you're left stuck with Tiger, it'll be like the Stone Age, and Leopard's not much better. The faster browser that might run might be Firefox 3.6.28 .
Boost it to Snow Leopard or Lion and you could run
Spotify 0.8.5
Dropbox 2.10.52
Skype for mac 6.15
Firefox ESR (English version)

Just google for what you need; the internet's very mac-friendly and people expect to use their macs very much longer than they use their PCs. On the other hand if you want to edit videos or play computer games, as Roland says, move on.

It will cost hundreds to buy an updated mac, and ebay would be the MSE way to go for that. Obviously register with Auctionsniper or similar and use one of your free trial snipes to make sure you secure the item.

I mainly use the computer for browsing (Ebay, YouTube, etc) and for checking my emails. I also store photos and music on there (something I haven't attempted with the Mac yet..) I haven't tried BBC iPlayer on there yet either.

I also play a few games like scrabble, backgammon - nothing that requires a lot of speed/memory.

I know, new Macs cost a fortune! Which is why I took them up on their offer of an old one which was going begging.

I'm sure computers weren't this slow, even ten years ago, LOL. Like I say, I have a laptop with XP on it which must be at least that old, and it's much faster than the Mac.

knightstyle

Just to add that you will be able to upgrade to Snow Leopard,10.6, and it will make a difference but be wary of going any higher, I tried to install Lion on a same spec Mac and it just went round and round and then froze. I had to do a factory reset so lost everything. fortunately I had backed up so just a pain.
So if you do upgrade go for Snow Leopard and back up everything you think is important.

fleshandbone

You need a new PC matey!

artyclarty

My partner has this exact model and it is still going strong! As has been mentioned, just need to max out the ram and upgrade to Snow Leopard and it will happily play ball for basic web browsing.