Help for my kid sister please

[Mainframeguy]

This is a little tricky to explain, but basically my little sister has an iMac dating from about three years, running OS 9. She lives in a rural area (no broadband) and really needs to get online but is having no success whatsoever.

I have even been down to try to help, made sure all the correct passwords and dial-up numbers were in place and cleaned out the MACs cookies - still no joy. I have been in touch with her ISP (Tiscali) and still no joy.

I am determined to sort this - I do know the access should be trouble free because my sisters neighbour can get online no trouble with a PC to the same ISP.

What advice would you have - I really don;t know enough about Mac to know whether my sister should try to get OSx 10 or if it will run on her machine. If that is the answer how should I go about getting hold of it for her. On the other hand maybe what I need is an "Apple friendly" ISP?

Be aware my sister is as "non-geek speaking" as they come, and I can only be on site occasionally so whatever solution I come up with needs to be user friendly to implement too...

I await posts with interest - especially what Speedy will say.... 😉

 

[SPeedY_B]

I'd recommend OS X over OS9 any day, however, what spec is the iMac?

I'll look into the OS9 + Dial-up thing a bit later, gotta run for work now.

 

[Mainframeguy]

update....

....I'd recommend OS X over OS9 any day, however, what spec is the iMac?

well so far she tells me this Mac OS Z1-9.0.4
ROM 4.6.1 ... 192 MB RAM ... and there seems to be 128 MB left on the HD (which I have trouble believing!)

PS My sister is really pissed off because I have hinted she may need to upgrade and feels she has an £800 iMac that should not need an upgrade... she just hung up the phone on me actually... it is thgis kind of thing that puts me right of macs!!! Hope you know what I mean Speedy...

 

[SPeedY_B]

Well if she's running OS9 she must of owned the machine a fair few years, it's basically redundant, the only people who use it are professionals who can't use OS X because their software isn't ported (that used to be the case anyhow, seeing how old OSX is now, many apps have been ported and I don't know anyone who uses OS9 now, it's sort of the Windows 95 of the mac world)
I'd need to know more than that to ascertain if it'll take OSX, processor speed/hdd space are required.

With regards to using dial-up on os9:

1) Go to the Apple Menu (Top left Corner)

Open Control Panels
Select TCP/IP
In the TCP/IP window select Connect via: PPP
Leave the rest of the fields blank - they will be dynamically supplied by the host

2) Go to the Apple Menu (top left Corner)

Open Control Panels
Select Remote Access
In the Remote Access window, select:
Name: your name for UCR dialup is your UCR email address
Password: same as your UCR web account
Select Save Password
Number: 529-2760
Note: the Options button and the options presented thereafter

3) Go to the Apple Menu (top left Corner)

Open Control Panels
Select Modem
In the Modem window, check the following:
Connect via: Internal Modem
Modem: Apple intrenal 56K modem (or other if needed)
Sound: on or off
Dialing: Tone

Here's an example with screenshots: http://www.themacisp.com/support/macOS9/setup.html

Tiscali Settings
login username@tiscali.co.uk
incoming email (POP3) pop.tiscali.co.uk
outgoing email (SMTP) smtp.tiscali.co.uk
FTP server ftp.myweb.tiscali.co.uk
Webspace address http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/directoryname
Usenet news.tiscali.co.uk

Phone numbers
Pay As You Go 0844 057 5000
Surftime 1470,0844 040 4102
Anytime 1470,0808 993 3031
Offpeak 1470,0808 993 3050
Daytime 1470,0808 993 3151
Daytime Plus 1470,0808 993 3057
50/100 1470,0808 993 3030

DNS
Primary DNS 212.74.112.66
Secondary DNS 212.74.112.67

 

[SPeedY_B]

Examples from tiscali: http://www.tiscali.co.uk/help/connectionsettings/mainmac.html

 

[Mainframeguy]

thankyou thankyou thankyou

.... now the only trick is how I get to speak to her! She is so upset because she never managed to get online and in the meantime her Mac has become outmoded... even though I offer to buy her a G5 for free it is no consolation!! We need the wisdom of evil Marge to understand the female mind here or something - it is well beyond me! But your information is what she requires and may enable me to satisfy her perverse desires to go online with this piece of archaic kit... we all have our little kinks or something I suppose... 😛

 

[SPeedY_B]

Her mac isn't outdated at all. There are still 200Mhz and slower iMacs out there browsing the net happily. I'll admit OS9 can be a bitch, but if it's what you're used to and it works, there's no real reason to upgrade to OSX.

Something that impressed me with OSX is when panther was released, someone I know actually admitted he liked it, now for years before this, he despised OSX in every was and refused to use anything but OS 9.2.2 (He works in the music profession), so Panther is definitely doing something right 🙂

If you feel like buying a G5 though, I'll gladly accept. 😛

 

[Mainframeguy]

Finally got the spec...

Her mac isn't outdated at all. There are still 200Mhz and slower iMacs ...

Right... so now I have made the journey for a family get together I have managed to get the spec. Her iMac is a PowerPC G3 running at 400 MHz with a 10 GB Hard drive. And yes, she has virtually filled the HD (126.7 MB free!),

I realise there is no "need" to move along to OSx, but is this hardware OK for it? And, most significant of all - what's to do about the HD situation? I am a little bit clueless when it comes to macs - have to admit on the same family trip I updated my older sisters Qbics box with an AGP card (my discard 😉 ) and a DVD reader - no problem... but with the mac I have to ask those that know what to do.....

So speedy - what's your advice now (and yes, NetRyder, I'll listen to you too!)... 😛

 

[SPeedY_B]

OS X will run on 400Mhz, it's more memory hungry than processor, I ran it quite comfortably on 256mb for a while, it will on 128 though (I think that's the minimum), so the 192mb she has should handle it.

If she's happy with OS9 though, may as well stick with that, because OSX will run on that machine but it will be quite slow (Imagine XP on the same spec) and probably won't seem worth the money.

I do think that her HDD should be cleaned out though, filling a 10GB drive on OS9 isn't really possible without a lot of user added files/apps/data/blah.

 

[Lee]

well so far she tells me this Mac OS Z1-9.0.4
ROM 4.6.1 ... 192 MB RAM ... and there seems to be 128 MB left on the HD (which I have trouble believing!)

PS My sister is really pissed off because I have hinted she may need to upgrade and feels she has an £800 iMac that should not need an upgrade... she just hung up the phone on me actually... it is thgis kind of thing that puts me right of macs!!! Hope you know what I mean Speedy...

Well if she thinks she knows better and also hung you up then tell her to get knotted and do it herself.

 

[NetRyder]

(and yes, NetRyder, I'll listen to you too!)

Me? I've never really used a Mac for more than a few hours.

But I'll try to help based on information I've picked up through reading. SPeedY should be able to give you much better real-world advise though.

First the facts...basically, as has already been mentioned, memory matters more than CPU in case of OS X (and most OS's for that matter). People have been running Panther smoothly on iBook G3's with maxed out RAM for general surfing, word processing etc. OS X is a huge advancement from earlier versions, and much more user-friendly. I couldn't imagine why your sister wouldn't want to use it.

Then the opinions...personally, I wouldn't touch a Mac that doesn't run Panther, but that's just me.
And yes, she definitely needs to go through some spring cleaning on that disk.

I guess that's the only little help I can offer here.

 

[LeeJend]

I lost track in all the upgrade talk. Did the internet connection get sorted?

If not consider that the modem could be fried. My neice lost here's to an electrical storm last spring.

Has the modem got any diagnostics it can run to check itself and the phone line?

PS: I have 10 year old P1 & P2 vintage PC's lying around here that can still connect to the internet on any ISP I can find. If the Mac (which are supposed to be less finicky) is acting up I smell a hardware problem or installation corruption. 1% disk space left is a formual for disaster. Try this one on her. "You pay $30k for a car that's good for 10 years and a $1k computer lasts for 3 years. Sounds like you got great deal on that old MAC but it's time to retire it and get a new one".

She'll probably hang up on you again but until marge shows up with real advice give it a shot. 😉