Downloading iTunes Videos on a G3 Lombard
September 12th, 2008 at 2:30 pm (Stubble)
It’s a challenge, to be sure. The laptop of interest here was happily minding its own business within the confines of Jaguar, deemed the most suitable OS for that generation of Macs, when along came the need to download a video on a portable. It being the newest laptop in the Mac inventory, built and first delivered in May 1999 (terminated in February 2000), meant it would be the one designated to do the heavy lifting involved.
First of all, the iTunes store will not permit downloads on a device running anything less than Mac OS 10.3.9 (Panther). That meant an upgrade of the OS was the first order of new business. Fortunately, the upper limit of OS installs recommended for the Lombard (also known as the “bronze keyboard” Mac) turned out to meet that requirement by a hair’s breadth.
Installing the Panther OS is no small matter when it comes to the Lombard. It turned out, after a couple of failed attempts and a bit of investigation that the Lombard has an issue having to do with the video hardware. About a third of the way through the first install disc, the screen would suddenly go wonky and the whole process would freeze (that is to say, crash). This issue was quickly resolved by reducing installed RAM to 256MB. After successfully installing 10.3, it was tested with all the RAM installed again. As a precautionary, the same procedure was followed during the upgrade from 10.3 to 10.3.9.
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