What to do with an old iMac

Got one from a friend..what to do with it?

[madmatt69]

Hey everyone,

Just got an old iMac from a friend who got a new one. It's not bad at all, 300 something Mhz, 256 ram, 60 gig HD.

I'm wondering - what are some good things I can do with it that I can't do with my PC in regards to web-work? Should I set it up as a testing machine? Or other cool functions for it?

Just looking for some ideas :)

[AmericanBulldog]

Recycling comes to mind, donate to a school or charity who could use it, and get a tax receipt you could use.

[madmatt69]

Naa I wanna use it. Just trying to find the best things to do with it.

[Timotheos]

Do-it-Yourself iMacAquarium [store.macaquarium.com]

[tedster]

Should I set it up as a testing machine?

I'd say absolutely. With Mac users averaging maybe 8% of the public, testing your stuff on a real Mac browser is a major advantage. It's funny how PC oriented we are - we'll worry about a Netscape 4 bug when less than 1% of our visitors may use that browser - but yawn about the entire Macintosh population.

Go for it!

[Macguru]

This box can also be your best employee. Discover the joys of AppleScript (sort of DOS for humans). With this combination, you can automate almost all repetitive tasks using many apps in a single script.

We used 5 of them bunched up on a table. All of them used to download logfiles, crunch the datas and upload the reports on some server space, 24/7 all year long. They just need power and bandwith.

[jimbo_mac]

you could also play some old retro games with it when you deserve a well-earned break :-)

[timster]

There's lots of stuff to do with the thing.

First off, make sure both Mac OS X an Mac OS 9 are installed and bootable so you can test in both platfoms.

Then you can start having fun with Mac OS X, which you may have heard, is Unix-based (please no-one start arguing about that).

You can fiddle around with Apache and Perl/CGI, which are already installed. You can install MySQL, PostreSQL, and PHP (all free). You can do most of this the easy way, with binaries made for Mac OS X, or the fun Unix-geek way, by instaling from source.

If you host on Unix or Linux, you may find that Mac OS X makes an excellent development/test server, even on an old dog like your iMac.

Good luck, and welcome to the club. In a couple years, you'll probably be ranting about Micro$oft, InHell, and Dull™ Computers.

[madmatt69]

Hey there,

Thanks for all the responses! I've got OS X installed on it and I love it..It's quite stable I'm very happy with it. I even got it networked with my PC within like 3 clicks, yet I still can't get my win xp PC and my win me laptop to see each other!

So for now, I'm using it as a backup server. I also made some droplets with Photoshop for image optimization, so I can just drag and drop the images and batch process the images, while working on other stuff on the pc.

Quite a useful little mac :) Good idea about downloading logs and crunching them...I might have to experiment with that!