Hi, I'm new here. I just acquired a 1996-era PowerPC Mac Performa 6300CD (I know, I've read what a crappy machine it is, but I got it along with a monitor/printer/speaker package for only $60, and it seems to run great). I'm not overly familiar with Mac OS, so I'm using this as a learning tool for me. Two things: -How do I safely and completely uninstall programs off this machine? I guess I have something like Windows' Install/Remove Programs utility, but I can't find it. Or can I simply Trash a program and have all its components get deleted too? -I've read the Performa 6300CD works alot better when upgraded to OS 8.1, 8.6 or even 9.1. Anybody have any experience on this? And what would system requirements be for those OSes? This machine has, I think, a 1.2G hard drive, and probably 175Mhz; not sure about the RAM, could be as little as 16. Thanks in advance!

First look in the installer program to see if they supplied an uninstaller. If the company did not then trashing the program will work just fine. Usually an installer log is created upon installation, so you can get all the extentions (if any) off your computer.

As far as the OS is concerned, use 8.6 if the machine has 32MB RAM or more, otherwise stick with 7.6.1. I found that OS 8.x before 8.6 caused more trouble than it was worth, and OS 9 runs noticeably slower on machines in that speed range.

Thanks for the help! I've started dumping a few obsolete apps, and there seems to be no harm done; another, an old version of AOL, did have an uninstaller with it and that worked fine. I also consulted a friend on the OS upgrade, and he agreed that 8 or up would probably be too much for this little relic to handle. Thanks again.

Geeeeesh. Don't use 7.x AT ALL on there. It's horribly slow and will handicap the machine far more than any OS 8 will. 7.x had virtually *NO* native PPC code in it and as a result is far slower on early PPCs than 8.1 or higher. I wouldn't use 8.5.x or up on it unless you max out the RAM and go straight to OS 9.1, which is still pushing it. 8.1 is the best OS for that machine unless you have some dire need for the features of 8.6 or 9, in which case I'd skip right past 8.6, which was a terrible RAM hog, and go straight to 9.1, which is faster than 8.6 on every Mac I've used it on (about eight different models) and MUCH more stable. p

Hmmm.... as it happens, I just got a copy of both 7.6 and of 8.1. I was going to try them both on the machine this weekend and see what happens. I'm crossing my fingers that 8.1 works and works reasonably fast. Are you sure 8.6 and 9.1 are even up for consideration? We're not talking about very much computing power here (see the first post at top for the numbers). I was under the impression that 8.1 would be pushing it, and 9.1 would be darn near impossible.

I've run 9.1 on similar machines and it's quite usable. 8.6 was noticeably slower. Both were slower than 8.1 but 9.1 wasn't *much* slower and it's much more feature-rich. (Unfortunately, it also uses more RAM, which is why I don't recommend it unless you have the RAM maxed out.) p