Hi First off i am very new to macs and do not know a single thing about them. Now a friend of mine gave me an old powermac 5500/250 computer his company was throughing out. Now when i boot up it gives me some printer error and all i can do is restart!! is there a way i can boot in a safe mode or somthing to fix this (i have no software). I have no idea what os it is maybe 7 or 8 not sure i also have no idea what cpu and ram it has. Any help would be appricaiated.. Also he gave me a G3 333mhz with 32mb of ram if i add more ram would it be able to run mac osx.. Thank you

Try this- Start up the mac with extensions off by turning the machine on, and immediately holding down the shift key until you see the message "Welcome to Macintosh Extensions Off". Then go in and remove the printer. That might work...

Well after holding shift it says disable extensions. but i then get an "Error 41 To temporarily turn off extensions, restart and hold down the shift key" just as you said but it keeps giving me that error now. Anyone have other ideas??

The 5500 is still quite a usable machine - I have a 5500/275. The 5500 has a PowerPC 603ev CPU, RAM is 168 pin DIMM (max 128MB). Normally, once booted, basic info about the installed Mac OS and RAM can be found by clicking on the apple in the top left hand corner of the screen and selecting About This Computer. Error 41 is a Finder error and can occur with Extensions Off as you've found. You'll probably need to find a Mac OS installation CD and boot from the CD (hold down C key when booting) and do a re-install. More info here: http://tinyurl.com/44z2 I'm sure I've got around this problem before without doing a reinstall but you would need some bootable media. A boot disk might be a possibility - try here: http://home.earthlink.net/~gamba2/ You'd probably need to get this downloaded and un-stuffed etc on a friends Mac because of file system differences between Mac and PC. You could then try going to System Folder...Control Panels and use Extensions Manager to select a base set but you really would be better off getting an install CD. (eBay). The 5500 will run anything from about OS 7.6 upto 9.1. I used to have 9.1 on mine which was OK but after the HD failed I reinstalled 8.5.1 which has a more responsive feel on the machine. Yes, the G3 will run OS X but it will need a major RAM boost. At the very least 128MB but more is very desirable.

Pyran thank you very much that was very informative.. I picked up os 10.1 off ebay for only $13 bucks seemed very low but it came form a respected seller.. But he said i needed usb ports?? is this true?? now the G3 uses pc100 ram so i can use some extra ram i have lieing around. Or am i mistaken? Still looking for a good 9.1 deal.. Thank you

The 5500 problem is very annoying, i bet...i had that problem when i disabled extensions and what i had to do was boot from a floppy and reset the PRAM...i used techtool 119 (theres newer versions, but i fuind this one much easier to deal with...) Thing is, in your situation, unless by happenstance you have it already on your system,you'd have to remove the printer driver first, but as you'd be booting from a floppy, you wouldn't be able to either copy techtool, or download it (no internet with a floppy boot, obviously). If, however, you can boot into the os after removing the printer driver, you can copy in techtool and reset (zap) the PRAM . If not , try it the old fashioned way, by holding down the command-option-p-r keys during boot (command's the four cornered squiggly sqare..next to the option key...well, heck, i didn't know it anyways, and it's not one of those things that help files think to mention). If you use this method youll have to reset the date and time, etc. after... If you want to try the techtool approach, here's one link for it. Http://mes.emuunlim.com/bin/disk_utilities/techtool.hqx

You can have a pc friend download an install disk for you from one of the sites the others mentioned in previous posts. I have Macs and a pc that runs WindowsXP. What I did that worked was to download it to the built-in Microsoft cd burning program, it's the default. Then I burned it to a blank cd. The file was readable and runable on my Mac. It won't work on any other cd burning program, however, just the Microsoft one. System software disks can also be burned on WindowsXP. The Microsoft program doesn't work for that. I used Roxio 5 Easy CD creator, but I imagine it would work with any other cd burning program. I put the Mac cd in D drive, a blank in E. Message boxes kept coming up saying the disk was unreadable and in a different format. I clicked them off. I used the "Disk copy" option in the program. It needs to be set to "standard" which allows burned disks to be used on pc's or Mac and burned it. The copy was totally readable and runable in my M