New
#411
Last week I trashpicked a Late 2006 White 24" IMac, took it home (weighed a ton to carry it the 200 metres to my home), found a power cable, USB Keyboard and Optical Mouse (all previously trashpicked!), and fired it up. It took an age to boot from the OS X 10.7 Lion install disk it contained (this gift keeps on giving!), but I couldn't install the OS, or get the disk to eject.
I had to learn a few Mac tricks, since the last Mac I had used was back in 2002, an IMac G3 with transparent blue case!
Sadly the IMac's white screen bezel was broken, So I took it off and glued it together as best I could. I found a 500GB hard drive (from a trashpicked Sky+HD STB) and replaced the 320 GB Western Digital inside the case.( Later this seemed to be working fine as drive E: in the screenshot!)
I had learned that when the Apple startup chime sounded, if you right-clicked on the mouse (not a Mac mouse) the DVD should be ejected, and after a few tries, out it came, filthy, but only slightly scratched. I cleaned and dried the DVD and it looked not too bad.
On rebooting, I managed to install to the HDD, and after not too long I had a working IMac running OS X Lion 10.7, with Internet running on Safari from way back when. I found an update to ver 10.7.5, and installed it. I discovered that the most recent Firefox to run on this deprecated OS I could find was Firefox ESR 45.9 (final update May 2017). So altogether, the IMac was pretty limited - like an XP PC from the same era is nowadays cut adrift through lack of support from 3rd party software.
Still, the processor was an Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 2.16GHz, and there was 2 GB of DDR2 RAM on board, and I knew I had an old Dell Latitude E6400 that failed to boot lying around, with 4GB DDR in it, so I upgraded the memory. I also remembered that the Windows digital license could be transferred to another machine...However the BootCamp version I had had support for Windows 7, so I dug up a Win7 setup disk, and installed it on the BootCamp partition I made using the Disk Utility App.
Everything was getting easier now, back on familiar ground. I downloaded 18362, and tried to install it but the Windows 10 setup insisted that the processor did not have the "NX" bit - which it definitely does have, so I cheated and copied a 32-bit 18362 zipped VHD installation, unzipped it from 3.5 GB to a 40GB VHD, attached it in diskpart, mounted it as drive g: and ran bcdboot g:\windows to create a boot entry on the Windows 7 bootloader.
And it runs beautifully. The only drawback is the time it takes to get to the windows boot menu. Perhaps a SSD will remedy that.
I may swap things around and install Windows 10 in the Bootcamp partition as a 64-bit windows, and get the 32-bit Windows 7 to run in a VHD, I'll see how things go.
So if you see an old White Intel-based IMac or MacBook from 2006/7 being given away or going for peanuts on EBay, Check it out. You might get a nice solid piece of a retro design classic that makes an excellent Windows 10 machine.
As a postscript, you don't need to keep the Mac GPT partitions 1, 2, and 3 if you don't want it - it will run fine as a Windows 10 only machine, either as UEFI or MBR.