I suppose I’m old enough to know better, but…
A month ago or so, we bought our children an old iMac for what seemed a bargain basement price. At last, neither my computer nor my wife’s would be hogged by kids either doing some homework or playing Runescape (more likely the latter). It shouldn’t be hard, I reasoned, to bring the computer up to date.
I went to the friendly Genius Bar at our local Apple Store. Not as easy as I thought. Just about everything these days requires OS X, so I’d need to add some memory, get an AirPort adapter and card (to access our WiFi) and update the system. He counseled buying a MacMini as the path of least resistance.
Undaunted, I plunged ahead. Tonight I enjoyed opening the back of the machine to slot in the new memory and the AirPort stuff. I’m pretty good at this kind of DIY, I kidded myself. Then I went to update the system with the Panther discs I’d bought from Amazon. Uh oh. It turns out that I need to update the firmware first. In fact, it seems as though I need to install OS 9 before I can install OS X (our old iMac runs OS 8.6).
So unless I can discover something different, I’ll have to wait a few more days until my eBay-sourced OS 9 disks arrive. Pop those in, and I should be ready to install the OS X. I probably should have bought that MacMini.