hello everybody and welcome to bull technology last week on facebook marketplace i stumbled
across a local listing for an indigo imac g3 that was listed for only eighty dollars i have been
looking for a reasonably priced g3 for a while and needless to say i decided to purchase the indigo
model so today we'll begin restoration on this truly iconic piece of hardware let's get started
upon getting the imac i first examined its physical condition it was in fairly good shape
however i did notice these black labels printed on several locations on the imac these labels seem to
indicate that this imac used to belong to a school district and that would make sense as even the
school district that i attended used g3 models back in the day there was also this annoying
bar code on the rear of the imac and a few minor scratches and scuffs on the surface of the device
i received this imac with this keyboard and mouse which is definitely strange the keyboard
is the correct model however the mouse is not the correct mouse for this model imac
this is the bandai blue hockey puck mouse used with the original and second generation
imacs not the later indigo models thankfully i do have a period correct mouse available
and i'll just add this hockey puck mouse to my collection the seller had informed me that the
imac was working and so i decided to test it out before any further work was done the imac hastily
booted into os9 which was nice to see there was very little on the imac which was also nice to see
however there were a few card game applications installed on the imac that allowed me to test
out the built-in speakers i also noticed after booting the machine up that the p-ram battery
was dead which is to be expected on such an old system i decided to play a cd in the machine and
unfortunately here is our first problem the cd-rom drive is definitely non-functional and
i couldn't even force eject the disk that i had installed oh well i think it's time to shut this
imac down and give it a good clean i decided to start by cleaning the keyboard because it was
absolutely filthy i began by removing all of the individual keys and setting them aside
after the keys were removed you could really see the gunk that had accumulated under the keys
the keys were placed in a tub of water and scrubbed individually and now it's time to
disassemble the keyboard housing flipping the keyboard over reveals a number of screws that
need to be removed and there is a hidden screw under this label that also needs to be unscrewed
then the top plastic bezel can be snapped off and it's interesting to see how the translucent white
color was added to the keyboard via this thin plastic strip next only a few screws need to be
removed that hold in the cable mount and the rest of the keyboard pretty much just falls apart and
here you can see all of the parts laid out when it comes to cleaning the larger plastic components i
decided to just run them under the bathroom faucet to remove all of the accumulated gunk and it
turned out pretty well for the keypad back plate i decided to use some q-tips to remove the debris
it's not perfect but it looks a lot better than it did and now it's time to reassemble the keyboard
my favorite part of restoring any keyboard is slowly putting the newly cleaned keys onto the
back of the board it's pretty satisfying the last step was just to clean the cord with a little bit
of rubbing alcohol and a paper towel and here's the finished product i think it looks much better
than it did when i first got it and now it's time to turn our attention to the imac itself
the first order of business was to remove all of these printed labels on the machine
i've had success in the past by using a magic eraser and some rubbing alcohol and using this
method i was able to remove these two labels on the machine the barcode label on the back of the
machine i decided to mechanically removed with a plastic spudger which worked pretty well then i
decided to just wipe the rest of the machine down with some windex and a paper towel and most of the
scuffs and scratches were removed again with the magic eraser and wow this imac looks pretty darn
good for its age the plastic really does shine even after 25 years of usage and while cleaning
the bottom of the imac i discovered the original product label which indicates that this is a 500
megahertz model with 128 megabytes of system ram and this rear hatch reveals the 128 megabytes of
pc ram so unfortunately though this is where this project is going to have to take a short break
there are several things that i would like to do to this machine both to update and restore it
first of all i would like to give this machine a new pram battery and thankfully i ordered
one online that should work with this imac but unfortunately it's going to take over two months
for it to arrive the next thing i would like to do is replace the cd-rw drive but after scouring ebay
i'm unable to find a suitable replacement so until i can find a replacement slot load cd-rw drive
i won't be able to do the next upgrade i have planned which is to update the os to mac os 10.2
i know that mac os 9 has a lot of nostalgia for a lot of people myself included but
mac os 10 is a much more usable operating system for this machine and speaking of usability i
would also like to upgrade the ram so those are my four planned upgrades that i have for this
imac and definitely stay tuned for a part 2 video in the future but until then be sure
to leave a like a comment and definitely subscribe and thank you all for watching
you