Question about old iMacs for a kid

[alm99]

I was thinking of picking up one of the old colored iMacs from 2000ish, but I have a couple of questions.

What is the likelyhood of one of these machines being able to run flash games from a site like disney.com? That is all it would be used for.

 

[u3laptoper]

I would say it will be difficult. eMacs may do better.

 

[Ka0t1x]

For Macs, Flash is one of those iffy situations that depend on CPU power. An older iMac with a G3 CPU might not be the best idea. Also, most of those machines need to run OS9 instead of OSX because of hardware restrictions, but they might be able to run 10.2 or 10.3 with a ram upgrade. I would think an eMac or 'basketball/lampshade' iMac, both having G4 CPUs, would be the best option.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Well Flash 10.1 apparently uses less CPU cycles so maybe that would be an option.

 

[Eug]

Even for kids, I wouldn't get anything less than a G4 iMac, but be aware that even G4 iMacs are slow for Flash 10. (Flash 9 is supposed to be OK, but it doesn't work on OS X 10.5.8 Leopard AFAIK.)

Flash 10.1 beta doesn't work on PowerPC Macs.

OTOH, if you get an old 17" iMac Core Duo, you can run just about anything. I see those going for under US$400 on Craiglist. A G5 17" iMac is even cheaper.

 

[umrigar]

what Eug said.

I wouldn't suggest a G4 slower than 1 GHz for modern sites with Flash content.

maybe if you could find a 700mhz G3 iMac (fastest made) for a reasonable price (like $50), but i'd say look for a G4 eMac or iMac > 1 GHz for as cheap as you can find. RAM at 768 MB-1 GB helps a bit.

don't waste your money on a G5 iMac, they're like time bombs waiting to fail, and fixing is very expensive. (just my opinion, i was a mac tech)

 

[Eug]

Even a 1 GHz G4 is too slow for stuff like Flash-based video like YouTube.

Well, it can be fast enough... only if you've blocked all ads on the same webpage.