just bought and old Imac g3 from yard sale. I'm a newbie to Mac. Problem is I don't have admin password and no Cd . Iknow i need the OSX cd to reinstall to reset the password. Once I get a cd, do i need to update firmware first? How can I can i update without password?

If it is already running OS X you don't need to update the firmware. Al you need is the CD so you can reset the password.

Okay, thanks alot for the info. One more question though, I don't have the cd for OSX 10.3 which is on my Imac, but my brother has a cd for OSX 10.4, can I use his if i have enough memory? I think i need to upgrade because i only have 128 MB of Ram.

You can if it is a retail disc, but discs that come with the computers are sometimes machine specific, that is they only work the model of machine they shipped with. 128 MB is woefully inadequate and maxing the RAM would be a definite must. With your machine, 10.3 may be better than 10.4 performance wise, 10.3 seems to be the sweet spot for performance on machines as old as your iMac. But if the 10.4 discs work in your machine, you could always try it and if your not happy with the performance you can get the 10.3 disc and reinstall.

Just a note, if you can boot the iMac to the current user and are able to get to Users in the System Preferences (depends on whether the old user set preferences to require entering the password before changing System Preferences), you can simply add a user with admin privileges, log into the new account and then delete the previous user's account and now your password is main and your password controls the machine.

Would not recommend anything over 10.3.X for your machine. 10.4 was not a bug fix release it was a feature introducer(like widgets) and was filled with bugs on its initial release. 10.3 is much more like 10.1 and 10.2 in that is was more of a bug fixer than feature introducer.

Much of the software out there will run on anything 10.2 or higher, some requires 10.3. I haven't seen anything everyday wise that requires 10.4 or 10.5.

Core 2 Duo 1.86
2GB DDR 667
ASUS P5L-MX
Nvidia 8500GT 500/1000

Thanks so much for your response... I just love this site! It has really helped me alot.