Slashdot Mirror
Beige G3 Resurrection Project
jgardner asks: "I have been a Mac user since '84, and lust for the latest hardware with the best of them. However, my bank account is less than accommodating. My current machine is a Beige G3 266. I use it for Quark & Photoshop work, and would like to move to Jaguar if the performance hit isn't too great. Does anyone have advice and/or experience that will help me save a few bucks and avoid any potential pitfalls?"
Is it me or are we getting desperate for movement here kids??
Fill 'er up with RAM. If you buy any other upgrade, you're half way to a new eMac.
You sound like my dad who doesn't want to give up his 486/100, or his 86' Imperial, or 75 Sear 19" console TV. Really, the time and effort, and certain headaches you will get, is not worth it. Go get an G4. Plus, you want to upgrade your OS but you think your high end software will run on it? You gonna run it under Classic and think it will run better? Why? You will have to pay a ton to upgrade the software so just upgrade the HW at the same time. The world turns and at some point you have to turn with it.
would like to move to Jaguar if the performance hit isn't too great
Seriously, why do you need to use OS X at all? What does it provide you that you can't get in Mac OS 9 currently that you absolutely need? I would seriously sit down and think about that one. Then, I would add up how much it'll cost you to upgrade you Mac to use OS X. Don't forget to include: hardware you'll absolutely need to buy, Mac OS X itself, native versions of QuarkXPress and Photoshop and anything else you might want, and the time you're going to use up upgrading your system and trying to get it to work with Mac OS X.
IMHO, the price is just too high unless you can simply buy a new computer, especially with the time you'll need to put into it.
Does anyone have advice and/or experience that will help me save a few bucks and avoid any potential pitfalls?"
Don't upgrade Quark.
The biggest problem I see (and I became a Mac user in 2001, so beige Apple boxes make me think of the Apple IIe) is how much OS X needs RAM. 512MB minimum. Really.
Not saying it's impossible, but how would you benefit by running Jaguar? You'd be running slower, you'd have to upgrade your software--I mean you're not going to slow down your system by installing Jaguar just to run Photoshop under Classic are you? Kind of defeats the purpose. Upgrades for Photoshop and Quark alone will run you $400 (don't remember how much Quark is, but PS upgrades are typically $200), not to mention whatever other software you use day-to-day. And the $100 or so for Jaguar. That's $500 there. You can buy a used iMac for that much and be a lot happier even if you're running your current programs in Classic (but this time on a machine that's able to handle Jaguar in the first place).
At any rate, you're better off asking this question on a Mac site. Mac OS X FAQ at http://www.macosxfaq.com is a good place to start. Best of luck if you try it, but I wouldn't bother. Especially if you want to get any work done.
The best advice I can give you is to throw your G3 266 in the nearest dumpster.
Mac OS X has trouble running on some of the older iMac's which came out after the PowerMac G3 your talking about. MacOS X simply doesn't have the hardware drivers for the older Mac's, and since Apple does both software AND hardware, it's unlikely that you'll find any third party drivers you can get your hands on.
You can get a good iBook, or eMac for under $1,000 these days if you're looking for something with OS X, I'd go with a G4 though. The G3's are slowly being phased out completely. I'm pretty sure that what ever version of OS X that comes after Panther won't even support most G3's.
Keep in mind that it has always been the pratice of Apple to 'encourage' you to get the latest hardware by making the latest OS require it.
Why? Well, it's fast enough to handle those jobs but not much else anymore (the latest Adobe products are total bloatware), it has an AppleTalk printer port, and a real live SCSI port.
Bottom line--save it for those OS9 apps you really just want to savor without the headache of Classic Mode.
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
Okay, a few things besides the obvious "buy an eMac" if you MUST MUST MUST keep this machine:
... plus, if you do this and later want to move to a slightly faster machine like a Blue&White G3 , which can be had for as little as $100 in 400mHz/0M/0M configs, the RAM and video card will carry over.
* Max the RAM (which, IIRC, is 768M), but is getting more expensive since it's special voltage RAM for this line.
* Get a G3 CPU upgrade either new or used (G3 Upgrades are hundreds less than G4 Upgrades)
* A new video card, if you're still using onboard video. A Radeaon 9200 PCI is $80 from Compusa and probably be several orders faster than the onboard Rage Pro chip.
* Faster hard drive. If you're stuck on some old 5400RPM your perfrormance can suffer -- this goes in hand with the next thing:
* New IDE controller. The onboard IDE doesn't do DMA/66/100/133 and is a real dog performance-wise. Something new can give you a surprising performance boost.
* Ethernet controller. If you have to push the limits, can even think about a new ethernet controller that will have less CPU utilization.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
This is probably one of the worst questions I've ever seen posted. Shouldn't this be an Ask Slashdot? Even so, it's a fucking 266, it's going to be slow no matter what you do.
I'm going to submit a story and put it under the Apple section, apparently they'll publish anything if you classify it as Apple:
Dear Slashdot, I've been an avid Apple IIe user since first grade. My old Apple IIe is aging, but I'd like to run Photoshop on it because my employer requires me to have it at home. Could anyone offer me any advice to help me in my quest to make Photoshop run in 32k of ram on a 2mhz processor? I'm guessing I will need to upgrade to the color card and buy an RF converter so I can use it on my JC Penny 13" color TV/VCR combo. Unless of course someone has some tips on running photoshop under monochrome. In addition, I would like to get into doing seismic analysis on my Apple IIe. I know this has typically been the job of large Cray supercomputers in the past, but my budget won't allow for that, so does anyone out there work for an oil company that does this on IIe's?
Look I love OS X Its great esecially on a dual 1ghz with 2gb of ram. Your beige wont have quartz extreme, and won't have any altvec enhancements. Basically you are looking to make yourself miserable. Now for email, word processing, surfing etc OS X works great on my Lombard 400 on teh other hand I might as well go to sleep if I want to do a decent filter in in photoshop. You will never get enough memmory to make it worth your while.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
At my last job, I spent most of a year using a beige G3/300mhz as my main desktop. It wasn't as snappy as my G4 at home, but it was much nicer to use as an everyday desktop than the more modern Linux & Windows machines I had access to, and for the sort of work I do (almost all in a command shell or web browser), this old Mac ran just fine.
The biggest problem wasn't actually the old CPU, but the fact that, with only 320mb of ram, I'd end up swapping a lot; and with a 4gb hard drive that was nearly full just with the OS and a few applications & some files (but not much, most data I'd store & access remotely via Samba or NFS), the virtual memory system would start trying to take up more disc space than was available. I ended up having to reboot the thing every couple of weeks, but *not* because the overall system was unstable, but because I was using 25% or more of my disc for swap, the drive was full, and applications started acting funny when they couldn't allocate more space. Usually it would help a lot just to log out & back in again, but to be sure I'd just reboot, since logging out & in took say three minutes, while rebooting took four. It was just as easy to flush everything out that way rather than logout only -- I'd already lost state in all my applications anyway, so why not reboot...
So yes, you can more or less happily run OSX on old beige G3s. As others have said, it makes sense to put in as much ram as you can, but not so much because you want to improve performance (that will actually be fine, for the most part), but because having more ram will stave off swap-death as long as possible. Likewise, if you can find an old SCSI drive to put in there, that will help for similar reasons -- once you start swapping, you have more leeway with a bigger disc. The actual speed at which an old G3 does things should for the most part be pretty reasonable for many tasks (shell, web, Office, etc).
Have fun :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
They're running around $500 on eBay.
:-)
Max it up with RAM and it runs Jaguar really well. Plus it has a DVD player, 2 USB ports, and a Firewire port.
I've been using it as my main machine since 2000 and the only time I get frustrated with it is when I'm compiling something from source. My wife has a G4 Powerbook and sure, it's zippier, but I don't perceive any major slowdown when I go back to my iMac. My jealousies are limited to the sleek aluminum case...
Now some would say it's a testament to Apple that their hardware doesn't become obsolete as quickly. Others would say it's because Apple hasn't made any strides in processing power.
My father is a blogger.
...if you're planning to keep your current Beige G3, I'd recommend staying with what you have got. Many have already mentioned OSX's steep hardware requirements -- you're better off keeping your machine as is.
:)
Better yet, wait til Panther comes out -- then order a shiny new G5!
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
I have a beige G3 and have experimented with OS X on it, aside from simply being and old and slow computer the big drawback for me is the lack of support for peripherals. It uses ADB and Serial bus instead of USB, SCSI instead of FireWire (though that probably is less of a problem) . Since it is the ONLY model to both support OS X and use these older standards nobody is ever going to bother writing drivers for anything that uses them. My serial printer isn't supported, my ADB Wacom tablet, etc.
I have a beige G3 266 and it works fine with Jag. Sure, there are annoying slowdowns at times, but for the large part I find it tolerable to do most things.
Illustrator and Photoshop open at the same time? Works just fine. Playing MP3s and working with the same? Fine.
So, my suggestions for what to add?
(1) More RAM, like everyone said.
(2) A better video card. There's no hardware OpenGL support for the rage pro (or worse, rage II) that's in your machine. I had a ATI Radeon PCI card that I got on ebay and it worked great.
(3) Don't bother with a faster hard drive/ATA controller unless you're really hurting. The stock kit is pretty OK unless you're doing disk intensive things.
(4) You can get a cheapo no-name 10/100 ethernet card for like $5-10. Many generic cards use a RealTek 8139 chipset for which you can download OS X drivers.
(5) The beige G3's were the most overclockable Macs Apple ever made. Many of the chips can easily be bumped to 300 or 333, and the jumper configuration to do so is dead simple. You can also juice up the FSB nicely to eke out a bit more bandwidth. If you want, slap a better heatsink on the chip (486 heatsinks work well) or just some thermal paste, but that's not necessary.
Check out xlr8yourmac.com for all of the details about overclocking and otherwise modifying Beige G3s (and other macs). They provide the best info hands down.
In sum: Keep with it! Beige G3s are great workhorse machines, and run Jaguar just fine.
Zach
I bought this Ultra 5 from eBay happy that it had a 270MHz CPU and will beat a Pentium2. It was a dog, was competing with my Pentium200MMX. The MMX was winning.
So after some analysis it turns out up to 400MHz cpu can be attached on the thing, and higher cpus have 8x the cache and better FSBuses. I bought a 333MHz cpu on ebay for 24$ and increased the ram from 128 to 512. Still a dog. Turns out the IDE controller does 33MHz at best so I had to go back to slashdot and invest in a SCSI controller and disk. The cheetah disk was 10k rpm and that changed a few things.
Now at a lower cost, this darn thing competes with a Pentium3 at many levels.
So if you realize your OSX adventure is going nowhere, look closer at the hardware. Before even thinking, max out the ram. Then think IDE and CPU. upgrages of these are dirt cheap usually on eBay.
Good luck.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I bought this system SPECIFICALLY to use OS X on. It was the cheapest OS X compatible system I could buy (found it at a PC-oriented used computer store for the unbelievably low price of $100, but at the time, it only had 256MB of RAM, the stock 4GB ATA hard drive, no FireWire card, and none of the external devices.) When I bought it, 10.1.3 had recently come out, and the boxed versions of OS X were 10.1.3. I bought a boxed 10.1.3 and installed it immediately. I didn't even keep a 'Classic' System Folder.
The Rage IIc video was not, and never will be, accelerated in OS X. And at 2MB of video RAM, 1024x768 only ran in 'thousands' of colors (Apple-speak for 16-bit.) That's what I ran it in. (I later got a revision b Bondi-blue tray-load iMac with the upgraded 6MB RagePro video, same as the rev b beiges, and it was significantly faster after 10.1.5 came out.) When Jaguar came out, I upgraded, basing my decision on the fact that I was going to get a Radeon 7000 PCI card, which could be hacked to support Quartz Extreme. I never was able to justify the 3x markup over the PC model, and never bought the Radeon.
Overall, I used that computer as my primary PC for over a year and a half. (Even though I had an AthlonXP 1.46GHz system right next to it, I only used the Athlon for games.) It ran just fine with the RAM upgrade. Yeah, videos were unplayable (thanks to the lack of video acceleration,) but all 'office' type apps, and internet apps worked fine. The hard drive upgrade did help performance noticeably as well.
If I remember correctly, the 266Mhz models have the upgraded 6MB Rage Pro video, which *IS* accelerated, and is perfectly usable for everything except 3d games. The only thing I would recommend is to make absolutely certain you upgrade to at least 512MB of RAM, and a hard drive upgrade wouldn't hurt either. (Just remember, if you use a larger-than-8GB drive, you have to put OS X in an 8GB-or-smaller partition at the beginning of the drive.)
(Just so you know, I traded in the beige, plus two old iMacs, to PowerMax for a credit toward a new 12" PowerBook G4. This thing screams. I don't even use the Athlon for games anymore.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I have a Beige G3 with 128MB (2*64) and it runs OS X 10.2.6 just fine for email and web surfing on an ancient 14" Apple RGB monitor (640x480). The biggest problem is the System Preferences panes extend below the lower margin of the display and are hard to set up. If you already have a larger monitor, you may not have that problem. I do also have a dual 1.44 for real work, but I keep the G3 for web access at a second desk.
More memory would be your best bet. I can't say how Quark and PS would perform but that's the app not the OS.
Truely, a new or used modern Mac would be a better investment than upgrades to this machine, but it does run Jag reasonably well and you can learn everything you need to know about OS X running it on this old system. Why not use it as a transition to a newer systems?
I know this sounds lame but, buy a G5. If you're actually going to use Photoshop and Quark for 3) Profit! then you should make it back in the first few jobs.
Beside if you've actually go legal copies of photoshop and quark that's about a $2499 software investment. You'd at least want some decent hardware.
Ok now be honest, you're just a warez kid with an old G3 and some dream to make it comparable to a new computer without investing anything. No offense but you need a new computer.
If you have a rev. A, upgrading the video card (Rage II) is absolutely essential for 10.2. Otherwise, the computer will randomly crash. You might not be able to even get through the install. If you have a newer rev, you may or may not need this upgrade.
Plus, a new video card will give you a significant speed boost, and you can turn on QE, which may speed things up a little more.
I Ran Jaguar on a G3 Beige DT 333 with 512MB RAM for a few months, and it ran OK. Just OK. It was stable, and everything worked, but I was not happy at all with the system performance.
When my Beige up and quit on me a month or so ago, I found a G3 Blue & White 400 on eBay for $300.
Considering that I have less RAM now, and there was only a 66MHz speed bump, I should be running slower, or about the same, right? Wrong. The bus architecture in the New World machines is so much better that I would guess at a 75% performance increase. The $300 was very well spent.
Also, the B&W removes the 8GB system partition limit found on the Beige, which was always my biggest complaint.
If you want the Unix bits, Yellow Dog Linux with an OS 9 drive for Mac on Linux (similar to Classic in OS X) and Photoshop 5.5 or 6 will work just fine, too.
The middle mind speaks!
Upgrading a Beige G3 is quite acceptable and will run Jaguar very well. I recently upgraded one, mostly because my main computer had finally given up the ghost and I needed one running ASAP (ie, within 2 days), only had $500 or so available on my credit card, and happened to have a 233 G3 lying around.
You can get an overclockable 450-466MHz rated G4 ZIF from OWC (macsales.com) for $190. 768MB RAM (ie, maxing out the G3's slots) will run about $90.
Assuming you're not running out of hard drive space, that's all you'll need to run Jaguar on the G3, and it'll handle just fine.
You may want to get a different video card, however. If you have a PC available, it's possible to flash the ROM on genuine ATI and some 3rd party ATI Radeon 7000 PCI cards. However, they have to have DDR RAM, not SDRAM. Got a 32MB dual head Mac version Radeon 7000 in this particular machine, and 2 64MB PC version Radeon 7000's in a 7600 running OS X, and they handle exactly the same. It's also possible to hack the system to run Quartz Extreme on non-AGP Macs. Not a huge difference, but there's a little bit. It'll bog down in some cases though, so do that at your own risk.. In any case, the PCI Radeon 7000 cards run around $40-$50, much cheaper than the Mac edition and double the RAM. Watch out for the ones on Ebay though, because nearly all of them are SDRAM cards.
Besides the crappy RealTek generic cards already recommended, DEC 21143 Tulip based Fast Ethernet cards are also supported natively under OS X. Not under 9 though, so remember that if you want to upgrade the net interface. 21143 controllers are much better than the RealTek ones.
This question is just plain boring (= very unslashdottish). It has been asked a million times before. Why don't you buy a copy of MacWorld (or similar) to see what they recommend in your situation; spare some space on Slashdot for _interesting_ stuff please.
With plenty of RAM (>=256MB and more if you can), and a fast hard disk with space for swap you will be fine.
;).
Or at the least it will be a cheap reliable workstation.
I gave my girlfriend a iBook 300 (clamshell with 284MB ram, and I put in an 18GB hd), setup 2 grandmothers with iMac's @ 333 and 233MHz, and I have an iBook 600 (with an 80GB I put in -- that was a pain).
The graphics aren't the fastest (never look at a new machine running Quartz Extreme -- you can never go back
But they run great (10.2.6), are stable and secure, and most importantly I never get calls about them.
you'll see dramatic improvements that may make it useable.
oh - and load up on some ram.
you'll also do well to pick up a decent 7200 rpm IDE drive.
oh for the love of gawd DON'T BE SUCH A PAIN IN THE ASS, LUCILLE!
by the time you drop $120 on the new OS, $350 on those fscked up "short" (you can't use normal PC 100/133 DIMMS because they don't FIT physically unless you leave the top off and if you're going to do that, Susan, just go and buy a PC for $150 and stop being such a girl) can't-be-found-anywhere memory except at some obscure "We have memory for the Mac IIvx" company for that hunk of ancient computing you have there to max it out to, what, 512 megs? - and the $100 for a decent sized hard drive, you prat, you've got yourself only a few pesos away from a refurbished eMac with 5 times the speed and a video card fruu uu UUUM THIS century.
you know.. i had this fight with someone who decided it was time to ditch all the Macs because the B&W G3/300's were to slow to run PowerPoint or Keynote compared to a new Dell 2.4 machine... and just throw out all that hardware and software investment (those B&w's are righteous OpenBSD file and email servers) because he thought "hey, why don't i just shove a pencil up my ass and say it hurts, so i sould go buy some PC instead".
I swear, Sally, if i hear about one more person ask "how can i get a 5 year old mac to run the lastest software from Apple that has system requirements for G4 and a video card with some memory and i wear this gigantic "i'm a cheap asshole" hat al the time, why?" - i'm gonna go off on a rant.
Look - there are no 6 year old PC's (Pentium II 200 with ISA slots and 8 meg AGP 1x ATI Rage Pros) running windows XP playing DiVX files, ripping DVDs, and running gawddamned Photoshop 7, okay? So while it may be novel and interesting to see you try this - why not pony up the money for that Commodore 64 web server while you're at it?
Look - i'm not saying you have to go sell your mother's body parts for cash - but you did say.. and let me get this right.
i want to run Photoshop & and Quark 6 on Mac OS X 10.2...
two of the most CPU and video card intensive apps out there on a computer from 1997?
well hell, Gertrude, i want to shit in my hand and sell it for $5 a handfull but i guess we're both in for big steaming bowl of toofsckingbad, aren't we?
And i hate to break this to you - but while you may actually succeed in this little game of Chinese "red-hot-fire-poker-in-the-crotch" torture you've concoted for yourself and actually.... physically.... get Photoshop to launch on that newfangled steam-powered machine running Mac OS X - you first must realize that when you are trying to run software worth 5 TIMES the value of your computer... ON that computer, that's as useless as picking up Beth Ostrosky on a Pee Wee's Playhouse moped.
Its quite a bitch, sometimes, that software ISN'T like hardware.. because if you're really so cash strapped that you can't scrounge up enough wampum by playing "pound the clown" at the corner sperm bank to buy a Mac from THIS millennium - but miraculously have on hand, and want to run the latest and greatest $700 photo editing software that would have made spy satellite guys from 1970 cream their pants at the site of the opening spalsh screen of Photoshop on a computer that really is as washed up as Gary Coleman (wait, he may be my next governor... hmm...) - then i can only assume that either there is some knucle dragging asshat boss out there that thinks "here, Christine, slap this shiny metal disk into your abacus at home" and figured you'd just work out the tiny new cunundrum by asking slashdot a question as improbable as "how can i make a device that will get Carmen Electra to fsck my brains out even tho i have automatic Karma bonus on slashdot?"
ORRRR
you ripped of your copy of Photoshop.
Because if you're plunking down the bling-bling for Photoshop and quark for Mac OS X 10.2 - yet you want to run those 20" s
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Here is a link to pci XTREME (which enables quartz xtreme on "incompatible" video cards including PCIs and 2x AGP's).
:)
This thing works with radeons and really makes OS X usable.. but there's word that it might max out PCIs when running too many graphic intensive things at once.. it's too bad a 266 couldn't run anything like that anyway
Without quartz xtreme, you almost can't use the file manager.. so of course there's a 3rd party solution: Path Finder. Formally named "SNAX", this extremely fast and effective.. I hate the new name though.
I fear nothing but my government. Vote Libertarian.
Your priorities seem to be a little off. Let's assume you work at some regional print shop. If you're running Photoshop and Quark, that means you're getting paid to do the work you're doing.
So let's see. You're willing to pay for (let's hope) Photoshop and Quark, but you can't find it in your budget to upgrade your Mac for a measly $1500, which will get you a brand new G5?!?
If that's true, you need to get into a new line of work, and if there's no jobs available there in Idaho, move somewhere where they got them.
I'm having a hard time putting your story together into a cohesive whole that makes any sense. If you said "all I do is web and e-mail and I can't afford to upgrade" then the answer would be "then don't". But when you name a couple applications that cost more than $1000 retail, but can't spend the cash on a new computer, and are the kind of apps you use for a business, you've got your priorities screwed up.
If I were you, and I were working with Quark and Photoshop, that indicates that I make my living off graphic design apps. Each hour I spend is either billed to a client or belongs to me. If you value your time, you'll constantly be buying the latest and fastest computer because it means your work can be done quicker, giving you free time, or getting you extra billable hours/projects.
If you can't afford to buy a new computer, you can't afford to go to OS X, because OS X will run Classic apps slower than OS 9. And if somehow you've recently splurged for OS X versions of Quark/Photoshop, then you really should have kept the OS 9 versions and gotten a new computer instead.
Any way you cut it, your priorities are way off. To answer the question, NO, your computer will NOT run OS X well, and even if it did, it wouldn't do well saddled with Classic on top of that, and then your memory hungry OS 9 based apps on top of that.
They key points are,
You can put in a G4 ZIF upgrade, but I can't vouch for stability or compatibility of those.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
The RAM in the beige G3s is (AFAIK) standard PC100. At least I purchase standard PC100 memory, install it and it works fine. I have two machines maxed out at 768MB of PC100.
Instead of a CPU upgrade card, consider reading the forums on xlr8yourmac. There's some simple jumper settings you can make to overclock the biege G3 system. I've got my stock 333 running at 375 and my stock 233 running at 275. That's 12% and 18% increase in processing speed respectively (for free). In both cases the bus speed is also faster so I get more data moving. I created a chart to help me when I overclock one of these machines (I've done 6 now). My tower has been overclocked for over two years without issue.
Video card upgrade is imperitive for OS X performance. Even the Radeon 7000 PCI that I picked (up when support for my VooDoo 5/5500 went away) is kick-ass compared to the stock video chip.
Get two cards, because a dual (or more) headed machine is a dream (I've got 2 21" monitors on mine). Each display driven by a separate card will give you better performance than driving both displays from the same video card.
Skip the IDE card. There are better uses for the PCI slot. Unless you are doing multi-stream video editing (not on a 266 G3 you aren't), or are running a RAID. The average drive on the market only sustains about 40MB/s, and that is just barely beyond the 33MB/s of the stock IDE chipset. The on-board controllers will support up to 120GB drives, and you can put in 3 of them while still using the CD-ROM. I personally have a SCSI(8G) and two IDE(40G & 120G) drives in my tower. I also have access to another 30 or so Gig over my network on various systems thoughout the house.
While on the subject of drives... rip out the stock CD-ROM drive and replace it with a CDRW. OS X will use a 3rd party drive without problems if you get a "popular" one. I use and IDE version of the Yamaha EZ2100. You'll need this because OS X refuses to recognize the built-in floppy drive and some sort of removable storage is vital (IMO). (BTW: take out the floppy and you can put in a 4th hard disk internally (mounting screws? What are those?)
Upgrading the Ethernet probably won't get you much. The CPU in a beige box will have a tough time doing much with the data at a very much higher bit rate. You'd never get close to 100Mb/s utilization with the thing. Unless you have a network file server on your LAN, the stock 10bT is more than enough for web surfing on anything less than a DS3.
Instead of the Ethernet install a Firewire/USB card. This will enable a whole world of upgrades to you: mice, keyboards, audio/video input/output, storage, printers, scanners, cameras. etc.
I'm planning on getting a G5 just as soon as my miserable employment/financial situation improves enough to allow it, but for now my Beige G3 does everything I ask of it on a daily basis all while running the setiathome program in the background. I'm just now starting to run in to games that don't play at all: The new UnReal engine kills the machine. I get like 1FPS on my setup.
In all, the Beige G3 tower is handling things remarkably well for a machine that was built in mid-1998
In short my advice would be to install: video, Firewire and perhaps more video. Max the ram and try overclocking
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
And put Linux (preferably Debian GNU/Linux) on that puppy.
;)
This seems to be an admission that Macs are expensive
As always, flame away Mac zealots!
Max out the RAM !!! * Get a graphics card that has at least 16MB of ram to take advantage of Quartz Extreme. * Get a processor upgrade if possible. * Wait for 10.3 - Reports say that older g3 performance will be vastly improved over previous OS X versions. * Get free programs from http://www.macupdate.com and http://www.versiontracker.com. * Unsanity has a free tool that disables shadows which may help. Another fine program is Diabolitin. It is like the extensions manager in OS 9. You can disable unused extensions.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
Today, I don't find software that's particularly more powerful than it was 6 years ago, but I do find bigger requirements: "what, dude, that's like so 1997, pay >$2k for something shiny/new." Excuse me?
As a student, I can well afford Adobe student prices, say, which (contrary to the suggestions in the majority of posts) are well below "$1000s in investment". But I can't slap down $2000 for a new computer, just like that. So I stick with my old machines, make do with a slower experience, and work hard with what I've got.
So, my well-employed / spoilt daddy's darling reader, if you think back to when you were still a hard-working grad / undergrad / high school student, you will recall that you couldn't just cough up $2k.
In fact, bah, what happened to people simply enjoying upgrades, and being able to create a workable machine without always paying the highest possible price? It's no good saying "after upgrading you're half way to a Y..." because that still leaves 50% investment saved. Maybe $500 is peanuts to a well-paid jobber, but it isn't to a student. If it is, I'd behappy to receive a cash sum of the "peanuts" you save with any particular investment decision.
I totally agree with everytihing you said....
but where can I get a G5 for $1500?! I know I can strip off the superdrive of a 1.6 but that still has it at $1800
1. Max the RAM; 768 MB can be found for under US$200.
2. Get a larger, faster hard drive; if swap you must, do it at least on something fast... Don't forget about the OS X install problem (i.e. install Jaguar on a partition smaller than 8 GB on a master disk on the main IDE bus).
3. Get a decent video card. ATI Rage 128 is a minimum (can be found at US$50; Radeons start at $100).
4. Get a G4 processor upgrade (prices start at $200); that should actually be #2: the G4 opens the door to Altivec enhancement, which can be a huge boost toJaguar performance.
Note that, as many people mentioned, if you do all these upgrades, you're basically half-way to the acquisition of a decent new machine (eMac or refurb PowerMac).
Also note that Some software tools, such as TinkerTool, can reduce the level of Aqua eye candy and help impove performance. You can also try to move the swap file on a faster disks.
Stéphane "Alias" Gallay
Now, where did I put this witty quote?..
Not having the necessary means to get the G5, I acquired a beige G3 recently as a way to have a desktop which complements my TiBook. At first, I planned to run Linux + MOL but thought I would give Jaguar a try first.
Surprisingly, once I had added enough RAM (512MB - those 66MHz SIMMs cost nothing nowadays) and a faster HDD, Jaguar was sufficiently snappy, certainly more so than WindowsXP would be on an x86 box from 1999! The built-in graphics is an issue, but once I added a PCI Radeon 7000, I really felt the difference. You can pick these up on eBay for a pittance (if you get the PC version, make sure that you have a Windows box so you can flash the card's firmware with the Mac firmware - this can't be done from the Mac itself).
Now, I have a great little MacOS X box which is sufficiently fast for me to use on a daily basis. The next thing to do is to see how well it handles Panther!
And use GIMP for your graphics.
Hrrm... I usually just sign my name.
What a bunch of wet blankets. If you're pretty much happy with what you've got, want to learn OS X in preparation for the future, why do so many suggest you dump Old Reliable in favor of an iMac, iBooks, etc.?
I'm assuming you have a reason for wanting to upgrade what you have. Maybe you can't afford $600-1,000 for a nice used blue and white G3. Maybe you have some SCSI peripherals, serial devices, or an ADB sketch tablet you don't want to replace. Whatever, you have your reason for wanting to go this route.
First, upgrade the CPU. There are lots of options with G3 and even G4 ZIF upgrades for under $100. Sure, you can run OS X on a G3/266, but you will find it sluggish. And after you get the faster CPU, experiment with overclocking. A lot of G3s can be pushed to 66 MHz faster, and almost all can go at least 33 MHz faster than rated. Details on overclocking on lowendmac.com among other places.
Second, buy two or three 256 MB sticks of memory. Under $30 each -- check ramseeker.com. This will make the biggest difference of all.
Third, if you still have the stock Apple hard drive, by all means get something faster. The bus in only 16.67 MB/sec., so no need to get the latest and greatest, but the stock Apple drive only uses about 2/3 of the busses potential.
If you buy a drive larger than 8 GB (hard to avoid these days!), YOU WILL HAVE TO PARTITION IT. The first partition must be 8 GB or smaller, and that's the only place you'll be able to install OS X. A bit of a nuisance, but you're trying to avoid the expense of a newer Mac. Drive should be under $60.
Shop around for a copy of Jaguar (OS X 10.2). You can often get it for under $100.
Bear in mind that the beige G3 apparently will not be supported when Panther ships. An unsupported install may be possible, but 10.2 may be the end of the OS road for your vintage G3.
For about $300-350 you can turn your old beige G3 into a faster machine that will perform decently under OS X.
Future upgrades you may want to consider -- but try living with this setup first:
1. A Radeon 7000 video card, about $70. No Quartz Extreme, but far better than what's on the motherboard.
2. A USB/FireWire card. $30 or so -- they are getting cheap.
3. A faster ATA controller. Anything over Ultra66 is overkill on this machine. About $60.
If you plan on going this far, then the others are right. Stop right now and look into at least a blue and white G3 -- faster system bus, Ultra33 drive bus, much better video, includes USB -- or one of the older G4s. $300-350 to get a decent OS X machine isn't unreasonable, but $500 in upgrades and software would be.
Best of luck with your project.
Do you know something I don't know?
The thought of selling this computer for a G4 eMac appeals, but not right away.
My father is a blogger.
It's the truth of the matter, and sometimes posting the raw truth can be painfully insightful.
Go buy a cheap G4.
I returned to the Mac world a few months ago buy buying a Beige G3/300/8Gb HD/128Mb RAM with a 20" monitor, keyboard and mouse from eBay.
I also managed to pick up a cheap USB/FireWire card, and a Radeon for Mac also from eBay. I put 256Mb RAM in that I had in an old PC.
The price of all this gear came at about 1/4 of the cost of an eMac/iMac -(Yes I know its also about 1/4 of the performance!).
I shot out and bought "Jaguar" after about 2 painfull weeks with OS 9.1.
I found the performance to be acceptable so long as you turned off all the fancy dock features and didn't expect *too* much from it (remember, your using hardware nearly half a decade old!).
It is slow, but its nowhere near unusable for things like email, word processing, web browsing, IRC, IM, and coding small applications. I used a Celeron 400 with 256Mb RAM with Linux and KDE3 for a while at my day job, and I would say it was nicer than that to use.
I would say - what you loose in speed by moving away from OS 9, is gained in stability with OS X.
In your case, I would try to pick up a faster G3 processor from eBay, put as much RAM in the machine as you can and see how you get on.
This is all depending on if you *need* to run OS X of course....
I used my G3 266 as a trade-in on a G4 Cube. Dropped the price by a couple of hundred of dollars.
Buying an eMac makes much more sense. there are a few things you can buy for a beige G3 that will make it better. I've hot-rodded 4 or 5 beige g3s. Here's a quick list:
:) But for your purposes, a new eMac will be almost as cheap for far better performance.
Radeon 7000 PCI card, $100-125. Dual display 32MB card. Pretty much the only game in town as far as video card upgrades go.
G4 Processor upgrade - I've seen a G4 366 ZIF chip as cheap as $89. Sure, its not the $500 1GHz G4 upgrade, but it gives u Altivec and twice the cache.
Max 'er out w/ RAM - about $75-100 for 3 256MB PC100 DIMMs.
For storage, HDs are pretty cheap. Spend about $50 for 40 or 60 GB of storage.
I've seen a Combo drive that can be made to work with OS Xfor $50.
So we're now sitting at around $399 worth of upgrades, not including USB/FireWire (another $50), and if you want a faster processor (and you are going to want a G4 for the Altivec) you're looking at an additional $200.
So right there, for a decent speed (500 MHz) G4, plus USB and FireWire in the above mentioned price, its $649 worth of upgrades, and you STILL have slow ass 10T ethernet.
For $250 more than that you can get a Combo drive eMac w/ more HD space, faster networking, AirPort extreme capabilities, more USB ports, new (optical) mouse and keyboard, a later generation G4 processor running almost twice as fast, a better graphics card with AGP as opposed to PCI (think Quartz Extreme support for Quark 6!), and a really nice built in 17" monitor, etc etc etc.
Buy the eMac. Seriously. Not to mention the software trickery involved in getting all those upgrades together and working in OS X (editing the CD-RW driver support files, G4 cache enabler, tricking it into installing the DVD player, etc.)
Plus the beige can't boot from FireWire, and if you want decent HD performance you'll need an ATA card as well (another $50.) See how it all adds up in favor of just buying a new eMac? Its faster, easier, will give you WAY less headaches, and will perform better for what you want.
Now, if you were just a hobbyist looking for a cool project to trick out a beige, I'm the guy you wanna talk to
I have a beige G3 233 (overclocked to 292Mhz thanks to the jumper thing), 160 Mb of RAM and OS X 10.1.x.
1 2428) you can only put as much as 192 MB of RAM on you G3...
... but don't expect OS X to be quick on that hardware!
The computer is useable but slow. 160Mb of RAM is not enough to OS X. According to Apple's spec (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=1
If you don't plan to use many programs at once and are willing to wait for ((insert whatever you do)) go for it.
Anyway, I would recommend that you give it a try, even if it is slow, IF you want to try playing with the command line or prefer to look at superior graphics
~jeff
"What does it provide you that you can't get in Mac OS 9 currently that you absolutely need?"
1. Stability.
2. Stability.
3. Stability.
4. The ability to run *nix apps.
blog |
I've done this more than once.
OS X on a 266 G3 makes a great server. OS X on a 466 G3 makes a decent workstation.
You need to get at least 512MB of RAM, I suggest 768 while you are in there blowing away the dust.
Stock video card sucks even if you got the extra 4MB module and went to 6 total, go find a first generation Radeon PCI card.
I'd go grab an Orange Micro combo USB/Firewire card while you are at it too.
Then either upgrade the stock 4 or 6GB hard disk, or get an external Firewire drive and use the stock drive as boot.
Or you can get a 500 or 600 MHz iMac for the same price and a lot less headache.
I use my original beige G3 with Jaguar. You will need some hardware upgrades. I run the following and machine is not only useable, but very fast with jaguar. 512mb sdram 533 mhz g5 ATI Radeon 7000 pci usb/fw pci card atto u2w pci card 10k seagate cheetah I would recommend the ram first and see how the machine feels. I have used a 300mhz ibook running Jaguar with 320mb ram and it's quite responsive and useable. If you want fast you will need the cpu and graphics upgrades at least. Checkout the Xbench site for actual speed scores of various machines. Problems: The biggest problem you will have is if you try to boot from a volume other than the primary ide drive. Using a scsi drive over the pci bus as the boot volume was causing me endless headaches where the machine would lose the boot drive, until I figured out that booting from the CD was killing my OF variables in such a way that I could no longer boot from the scsi drive, so I learned to NEVER boot from CD once I got my system installed. YMMV, TRP
I own a 233 beige G3. 512 mb RAM, 40 GB 7200 HD, 5E (slashdot does not like the euro-symbol) Ethernetcard, 10E Firewire, 5E USB. Runs 10.2.6, Photoshop 7 and Flash MX, and a big bunch of *NIX thingies. True, no grafics-acceleration, a bit slowresponding sometimes, and a partially handtuned kernel, but it works. No games. I think it will last at least one half year more. OK, if I do bigger Photoshop-projects, I am able to use the dual 1GHz at work. Oh, and forget about 3D, except zBrush, which runs like hell.
Have Fun.
In terms of saving money, you're better off with an eMac and a few new peripherals. The performance is SO much better, you'll be blown away. That, and you'll be opening up a world of cheap USB and FireWire goodies that may not work so well on an older machine with a USB/FireWire card. The stability of OS X on an older machine is fine for a server, as you're not doing much with the GUI and it pretty much sits there with no heavy load in terms of the apps you're running. As soon as you start using the box day to day, it's a bad thing.
Case in point, I have a Power Mac 9500. It's a great machine, and I made it into a server not to save money (an eMac with some hard drives would have been cheaper) but it was a fun project to see what one could do with an old tired machine. In it, I have (3) 120 GB hard drives, an ATA/133 card, a PC Radeon 7000 video card, a USB card, a FireWire card, and two 10/100 NICs. The only thing the eMac couldn't do is the extra NIC.
This is much like an old car. Don't buy an old car with the hopes of turning it into a viable alternative to a new car (in terms of dollars spent.) If you want the best bang for the buck, new machines are what you want. If you want a time-killer (ie, your project machine) play with your beige G3.
I have a couple of beige G3/233's running Jaguar, and I've been pleasantly surprised with the performance. Although Jaguar has the reputation of being slower than OS9, I find that they feel "snappier", probably because the improved multitasking doesn't let one application bring everything else to a standstill. You can even work in one application while another one is loading. Performance is fine for web browsing, word processing, and other routine tasks, and iTunes runs well, copying from the CD drive at about 1x. I wouldn't plan on watching videos, however. Most OS9 apps run fine in the Classic layer, and you can always boot to OS9 if you need to.
Main limitations:
1) I don't think the built-in SCSI is supported (I couldn't get it to recognize a SCSI scanner). I haven't tried the floppy.
2) Some people have reported trouble getting OSX to install, and have had to pull out some RAM &/or use XPostFacto to get it to install. I haven't had these problems myself.
3) If you haven't already done so, you should put in as much RAM as it can hold. RAM makes a substantial difference in performance.
One more caveat: if your HD is more than 8 GB, you will need to repartition so that the first partition is a bit less than 8 GB, and use that one for your OSX install.
I guess I must be the only person on the planet that had a stable OS 9 environment. It would crash or freeze once every other month or so. I've had as many or more kernel panics since moving to OS X.
This advice is akin to: "want to know what a bacon sandwich tastes like? Take some cheese, put it on a sandwich and sort of erm that's it. You'll love it."
I imagine you can't get a taste of linux by installing Windows and changing the theme...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
If you already have the ram........ you said you were working with photoshop. 1. G4 350mgz upgrade from Wegner Media $80 2. 80gig HD pricewatch $63 3. USB & Firewire cards $40. 4. New usb printer $50 (cant use old printer in X)
I did it. I put it together for my uncle. It works OK. I wont do it again.
I have a Beige G3 AIO (All-in-one) with a screaming 266 Mhz G3. It's running 10.2.6 just peachy on 192 MB of RAM. It's a pretty upgradable machine. I'm looking into a few upgrades myself. $72 to max out my rev a board to 384 MB of RAM, $50 for a 52x burner, and $50 for a 20 GB HD. Like others have said, you could probably get a halfway decent video card and a Firewire card and a USB card too. Total cost for the upgrades should be about $275. All the parts are readily available on Newegg.com. Most PC components will work in a Mac, but check the compatibility just be safe.
Don't kid yourself this isn't a Photoshop or Quark machine. The machine is perfectly fine if you're going to do web surfing, e-mail, and Word and Powerpoint. This machine will not beat any benchmarks or set world records for speed and CERTAINLY won't run Photoshop any faster than molasses in wintertime.
You use Quark? OS 9 was impressively stable if the software you were running on it was well written. I've got an OS 9 filemaker server that hasn't gone down in over a year. But running something ineptly written like Xpress will bring even the stabalist machine to its knees. Running Xpress 4 or 5 in classic it will only bring down the OS 9 layer and not the whole machine (thank you protected memory).
I've used OS X since Rhapsody and have only once gotten a kernal panic and that happened when I unplugged a firewire drive while it was being written to.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
i just got a beige g3 266 off ebay! for $100 it had 1 4gig hdd and 256 megs of RAM runs jaguar like a charm! i gave up my athalon with linux on it and use this as my desktop. I use linux toplay movies (becasue this is too shlow for divx) and as a file server ;-p
I lOVE MY G3! go for it!
-anu
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Hello,
I am thinking of moving from my G3 to the G5, but only when the Panther OS is preinstalled. Would you be interested in buying my computer?
Here is what I have...
1) G3 tower 333
2) Dual monitor card. - ix3D Ultimate Rez
3) Scuzzy (card) HD, 9gig
4) Capture Card. - Pinnicle, miroMOTION DC30plus (captures 4MB per sec.)
This computer has never given me any hardward trouble. It has been a great computer.
Thanks,
Rob
jcnvent1@earthlink.net
It's really not bad at all. Here are a few things to watch out for, though.
Remove any PCI video cards. I had a Voodoo3 in mine, and OSX would have a kernel panic or lockup(depending on the version) at CD bootup.
Add RAM. Steal the three largest PC66, PC100, or PC133 RAM modules you can find, even if it cannibalizes an old PC motherboard. I ended up with 448MB in mine. Anything over 300MB is great for OSX. You only need low-profile RAM modules if yours is a desktop machine. Mine's a tower, so I didn't heed any such warnings.
Get a second hard drive. The 4GB SCSI I had in mine was perfect for a system drive, but OSX will use more than half of that(once all the updates are applied and the iApps are upgraded to the latest). A 20GB internal IDE worked out just fine as a data-only drive(as a system drive, it's dodgy. OSX requires partitioning and must sit in the first 8GB of the drive).
Get a CD-RW drive. I had already installed a Yamaha 8824, so I was good to go.
Now, since you have 4 drives in the thing, remove the original CD(or DVD) drive. The power supply won't handle 4 drives. It'll give you a startup chime, then shut itself off unless you remove a drive. The Yamaha 8824 is fully supported by OSX, so I was in luck.
Get a USB PCI card and USB mouse if you don't already have one. ADB is only for a keyboard under OSX. It won't recognize an ADB mouse(or monitor with an ADB hub and color correction, for that matter, and yes, the keyboard works fine through the monitor).
Installing OSX is a breeze. I reformatted mine and ditched OS9 completely, but you may not want to, depending on what you plan to use the machine for. A server will not require a classic OS9 installation. A workstation might, though. I personally set up WebDAV on it. It'll be a decent home server until the PSU craps out, I'm sure.
> they feel "snappier", probably because the
> improved multitasking doesn't let one application
> bring everything else to a standstill
You must be running a different Jaguar than I am.
Can you say "spinning rainbow pizza wheel of death"?
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I have one of these machines, and went through the same thing myself recently. Assuming you really want to go through with this,
1) Get more RAM. As much as you can afford. At least 512MB before you start looking at anything else.
2) Get a cheap Radeon card. No point in buying a good one, but a cheap one will let the machine use Quartz Extreme graphics, which offloads a hell of a lot of work from the CPU. It's not faster for those complicated photoshop transforms, but it makes the machine feel much more responsive. If you can't do that (and maybe even if you can), turn off the graphics doodads that you can live without. Do you need anti-aliasing, transparancy, or drop shadows? Turn off the bouncing and the genie effect in the dock.
Things that aren't worth it:
-A CPU upgrade. If you go this far, just give up and buy a faster machine. CPU upgrades are expensive, the performance is usually underwhelming, and you can kiss any hope of support or resale goodbye.
-Paying full price for OS X. If you can get an academic discount ($50), a family pack, or a site license, great! Have fun. Paying $130 to upgrade hardware that's worth... about the same amount... is probably not worthwhile.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Step 1: Buy a Adaptec ATA133 card, install ($65) (Note: step 1 is not necessary, it just helps speed things up significatly) Step 2: Buy a nice cheap 80GB ATA133 (if no card, a ATA66 drive) drive (you can get one for less than $30 from Comp-USA with rebates) Step 3: Max out RAM. Can get cheap, very good RAM from www.satach.com I maxed out my Supermax S900 with 1GB RAMfor less than $99.) For the G3, Ide think less than $60. Step 4. IMPORTANT: partition your Hard drive into two partitions, the FIRST as 8GB, the rest, whatever is left. Step 5: get a Sonnet G4 ZIF processor upgrade, install. (About $250) Step 6: Get a new video card that supports Quartz Extreme. That should about do it. Ive been running OSX 10.2.6 on a Beige G3 Desktop and have had no problems whatsoever. If you are runnning classic and OSX, you sometimes have to physically pull the finder out of the system folder to trick the system into booting into OSX. Once you do that, it works fine. But Ive done this only with 1 machine as a test and that most of the upgrades I acquired when I was using OS9 exclusively. Frankly, when you add up the RAM, the ATA controller, the new Hard Disk, the Processor Upgrade, video card, and the OSX software (assuming your not a pirate), it just isnt worth it. Go to ebay or to macconnection and look for those really cool eMac's that are around $700. You can even get them refurbished with warranty for less. And they scream compared to the poor old G3233, even with all the upgrades.
I recently put a g4 450 I found on ebay into my beige 300mhz box. I'm running Jaguar quite happily with 384 MB's of RAM. I did have to throw an extra cooling fan into the box though. The total upgrade was less than $120.
They usually will get you about $15,000 per nut.
Then go get a G5 with a Cinema Display and save up the rest of the money for the next gen of powerbook.
My thoughts on the subject of Beige.
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
Add memory. Lots of it, and you can get OSX to run on your G3 266.
But you will never be productive.
I know. I have a 266 too. I was seduced. And had my heart broken by the siren osx. It'll run. But it won't be as good as OS9 on that box.
The mac is great because it just works. But this isn't so with OSX on a G3. Don't do it! You'll be sorry. And you'll come crawling back to OS9.
Or you'll realize the value of your own time, and just bite the bullet and buy a used G4. If you possibly can, why not save yourself the trouble and go straight to that step.
If you are going to be actively interacting with the computer stick with OS9. The graphics will just never get fast enough to use with OSX. I'm using a beige box with a G4 upgrade and an upgraded video card and it is still sluggish as anything.
However, I do get use out of having OSX on it. Because I don't actively interact with it much it works great as a little file server and to play mp3s from. Or to use as a command line unix box. And given that I'm no longer actively keeping up with the most recent software, under OS X I can have it running for months at a time with no problems which I couldn't have managed under OS 9.
Bottom line: No matter how you upgrade your computer, the graphics response from a beige box in OSX will never be close to what it is in OS9.
I don't know what you guys are talking about... I have a Beige G3 from early 1998. I bought a cheapo 400 MHz G3 upgrade for it. Costed $85 on eBay almost 2 years ago. Upped the bus speed to 83 MHz, processor to 415 MHz. Didn't bother upgrading the RAM, because I was just going to use the machine to do email, web surf, and play my MP3's. Here's my configuration:
128 MB RAM
10 GB 5400 RPM HD (on-board ATA)
On-Board ATI video (Whatever was on Rev 1, I don't remember)
USB Card!! woohoo
Awesomely fast STOCK 24X CD-ROM!!!
Photoshop is slow, but still usable. Like I said, I put it together with web & email in mind. My iTunes kick on it, too. Browsing the OS, web, email all works great. Fast and stable.
I have another Beige G3 that I upgraded little by little, and it runs Jaguar AMAZINGLY well. Here's the specs on that one:
540 MHz G4 w/ 83 MHz bus
416 MB RAM (32+128+256)
Sonnet ATA/66 w/ 2 7200 RPM drives (30 GB and 80 GB)
Radeon 7000 PCI
Generic Firwire / USB 2.0 Card
DVD Player / CD-RW combo (48X burn)
This machine runs EVERY application I throw at it like a champ. Video is flawless. It probably costed me more than a new machine in the long run, but the upgrades were made over two years, so it really wasn't bad.
Just an FYI - this machine benchmarks faster than my sister's G4 Cube (450 MHz G4). The AltiVec Carbon Fractal demo clocks it at about 1.65 Gigaflops under OS X. Not too shabby for a system from 1998.
Point - it can be done, and has been done successfully. The question is, "Is it worth the price?" Guess it depends on your attachment to the system.
I'm done upgrading this thing. My next machine will be a G5.
Rick
After upgrading all that you'll be practically 1/20th of the way to a new system. Forget the upgrade! Just get a new dual G5, Max out the RAM and disk space, grab a 23inch monitor, iSight, 30GB iPod, and an Airport Extreme. Might as well, it's the economy we're talking about here! Without sales tax or rebates, were only looking at $11,790 unless of course you want dual monitors. I saved you a cool $29 by leaving out the modem. You can use that towards the new mouse!
Find out how to get your order for $267.00 per month!
I have Jaguar running on a beige G3 / 333 and it runs very well. However, when using the ADB mouse there is an unfortunate delay between a mouse click and the system taking notice of the click, often resulting in missed drags.
To remedy this I installed a cheap USB card (no extra drivers required!) and now use a USB mouse instead. The system works perfectly, albeit noticeably slower. More RAM and a 32MB ATI card would go a long way towards improving performance. A RAID card would likely boost performance even more. And upgrading the processor to a G4 wouldn't hurt either.
The one insurmountable bottleneck on these old boxes is the slow (66MHz) system BUS. Anything to reduce the amount of data processing in-general will help its performance. I was able to get a marked performance increase in the Window Manager by turning off window-shadows using a nice haxie by Unsanity.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Don't listen to them. "Throw it Out" is a bonehead answer.
:( the PCI Radeon mac edition is as good as it gets for support and speed, but it's not much better than the Voodoo3 was in the Beige. I'm currently using the built-in RagePro 4Mb graphics and it's fine.
... oh and I'm also running jaguar on my parts monster 7500 that has gotten all the hand-me-down upgrades from my Beige. Not very fast at all, glacial bus, even lower max RAM.
Grab a copy of Jaguar(or better yet wait a month or two for Panther), and see if it's fast enough for you.
I have a Beige mini-tower that is still seeing use (and running Jaguar happily) as a file server, mp3 server, email server, and backup webserver.
I outgrew it as a daily desktop machine a couple years ago (after extensive upgrades).
It's your computer, so you know how slow or fast it is. If you can take it.
I am satisfied with how it runs Jaguar, especially as a server. I have not tried Classic on it. If you can afford to upgrade Photoshop, and crossgrade to InDesign, then go for it... Great for checking mail, listening to music and surfing the web as well.
If you play video games, don't expect too much under OSX without an AGP card with lots of RAM... i.e. not a 233 Mhz Beige G3
#1 throwing 3 128 Meg PC33/66/100 of the right memory sticks in there will be cost effective, and benificial.
#2 throw in a 100BaseT card (if it's a file server)
Upgrades I did to my Beige G3... years ago.
#1 RAM to 384 Meg (worthwile)
#2 A 450 Mhz G3 ZIFF upgrade, you can probably look around and find deals on 300 Mhz. Try Other World Computing's site.
#3 I added a 10 Gig and then a 20 Gig Maxtor SOmethingMax Plus 7200 RPM drive. MacOS X has a limitation on Beige G3's that the MacOS X boot partition must be within the first 4 Gigs. Put the system on that partition, and move your user folders to the second partition (if you have space).
#4 Added a Voodoo3 2000 3d card... awesome card for it's time, not supported under any version of MacOS X
MacOS 9 (and earlier) where never ever stable for me, no matter what machine I was using. MacOS X has been absolutly rock solid.
A little bird told me that Panther runs faster than Jaguar on my iBook 500... so I don't see why it wouldn't be faster on a Beige G3 as well.
On the other hand... why not give jaguar and some RAM a spin and save up for a new box, so you will have a UNIX web/file/music server ready to rock the house.
We have beige G3 all-in-one with similar specs. running Mac OSX is slow. Internet Explorer is the only really usable program. I would never in a million even think about quark or photoshop. Its probably 5 years old (a good lifespan for a computer) and putting in new upgrades will be waste of money when compare to investing towards a new tower. The upgrades may get you another year but cost half as much as a new tower. Breakdown, take out loan and get a G4. The G4 towers start at 1299. I know I can get another 5 years out of those.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Omg I think that G3 only maxes out at 196 Mb Ram. You can forget about the new versions of photoshop and quark. Get a G4. Check out this link
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
The only thing I really have to warn you about is the hell I had to go through to install 10.0 when it first came out. Apparently it had some problem with having RAM sticks of different speeds, so I had to open it up and pull out all but my 256 stick, install the OS, and then plug the sticks back in. All of the OS upgrades since have gone without a hitch.
"Procrasination is the key to world peace." ~Some girl in California
It is not worth it. Even with 768MB of ram, you will need to hit the disk, which will be slower than treacle flowing on a 0C day.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
1) get an eMac. You'll be much happer.
2) However, i'v done this. So here's what i didn:
Get a lot of ram. At least 256 more(maybe you can get by with less as i also run openoffice, but ram is dirt cheap).
Don't expect to run anything in Classic mode. It runs really shitty (worse than usual) on these old boxen. So you may end up having to shell out for all new apps.
However, all will be in vain, as the screens on those are too lo res to run anything properly. You'll fin that the control panel and many dialogs don't fit on the screen. If you're gonna buy a new monitor/grafx card, it'll make mroe sense to buy a new eMac.
Personally i'd get a eMac. It's got much better hardware, a damn nice screen and it can pump out classic mode apps reasonably ok. You can get the base model for only $799, which is pretty damn cheap.
...but I now have a one-inch crack in my skull from laughing at this shit. Hysterical. Sadly true, of course, we have consultants who tell us that Lotus Notes ND6 is just fine on any Pentium with 64 MB of RAM.
The triumph of hope over experience never ends, do it?
"I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing."
I upgraded my 233 beige MT and it runs just fine with Jaguar. Check Wegener Media. I bought a G4 ZIF upgrade there for less than $100 and overclocked it to 450Mhz. You'll have to fiddle with clock settings and jumper pins, but it's pretty straightforward. Check www.xlr8yourmac.com for a link to instructions . I also added an 80 GB drive for $80 after rebate. Add all the memory you can afford. I have 768MB installed. Make sure it's all exactly the same brand and type. Also, be sure that the 256MB DIMMs are not made with high density chips. Your machine will only be able to use 128MB of the full 256MB. The DIMMs you want have chips on both sides of the DIMM, not just one (or just buy memory guaranteed to work in your beige machine). Leave only one DIMM in place while installing Jaguar or the screen may go blank on you and the install won't complete. One last note: If you have a Royal voltage regulator, forget about adding a G4 upgrade (you'll fry your computer). Only a few beiges have the Royal VRM. Once again, the helpful xlr8yourmac.com site has details on how to identify the VRM
Nuclear war would certainly set back cable--Ted Turner
Trust me, it's not. On some of the later machines, maybe, but the Beige G3s and First Gen Blue&white G3's use PC66 with a different voltage (5v vs 3v) and, I'm told, different bank refresh rate. But I'm certain about the voltage difference.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Don't believe what those other guys say. They've never tied it themselves. I have.
I set up my boyfriend's biege G3 266 with OS X 10.2 and 512 MB memory. Worked like a champ, just don't try video playback or editing with the stock video card. I've done the same with 266 PowerBook. Both kinda want a larger hard drive, but 6GB was just big enough without iTunes music stuff.
If you do install a larger hard drive, the stumbling block is that the OS X boot partition must be first and it must be below 8GB. It's not obvious how to force the 8GB partition to the front of the hard drive with Apple's OS X drive setup. Use the 9.2 drive setup. To check your work, boot with a 9.2 CD. The first partition on the drive will be the first on the desktop.
You are either trolling, using unsupported hardware, or your computer is broken.
What do you do, change to root and rm -rf * or something?!?
I use the machine mostly for Photoshop. I can run Photoshop on ~35MB photos, print to my Epson 2000P via the USB card, talk to my camera (D1X) via the Firewire, play iTunes, surf with Safari, all at the same time, and the speed is fine. Really not noticably slower than OS 9, except there would have been no way I could have done all that simultaneously with OS 9.
Don't listen to all the people who are saying you have to put huge amounts of RAM on the system, or overclock the CPU. The machine is a fine computer as it is. Kudos to Apple for such good support for an older machine. One of the reasons I think so highly of that company.
Three words - "Smalldog Dot Com" dude. Get rid of that beast and get yourself a nice machine. Order a copy of InDesign while your at it, Quark has seen its last update.
Hello,
I have a Beige G3/400MHz, it was a 266MHz but I did a processor upgrade from eBay, very handy. It gives me extra power to run OSX.
One thing that I had trouble with was the fact that the IDE controler in PowerMac Beige (233/266/300Mhz) have a problem (I don't for sure what is the exactly problem). So you can't intall OSX in a drive that has the first partition bigger than 7GB. For example, if you have a 13GB HD, you MUST create 2 partitions, the first which with 7GB, the second you leave the rest.
Or you can install a new IDE card controller to break this limitation. Look here to understand: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3-ZONE/IDE/
Another thing is that the OSX MUST be installed in this first partittion.
Another thing that will help is memory, if you don't have 128MB of RAM, don't even try to install. The best is to fill up the 384MB that this model can handle.
Also see the amount of VRAM you have, the maximum is 6MB, if you don't have it buy to install.
My Beige PowerMac is running very smooth, I can handle works in Word, Excel, Mail, Internet Browser, Keynote, iTunes and even DiVX playback. Much more work can be done with it.
It is to early to give it away.
I hope this can help you.
[]'s
A few years ago, my Compaq 300mhz bit the dust (or rather the cheap assed motherboard did due to crappy capcitors).
I went to get a new mobo, and other parts. I got a mobo that supported dual Ghz processors, RAID, SCSI onboard, and was made by Supermicro (P6DGU). Great board, but i've been pained to get rid of it. I eventually put one 850mhz PIII in it, but since it uses slot 1 chips, the prices never really dropped on the second chip.
The main software I use is Protools, which only recently supported dual WinXp Pro (I got the mobo before I got protools), but doesn't support dual processors, it just won't work if you have a dual system. So i've never been able to upgrade to dual processors. I paid over 400 USD for the mobo, and 130 for a monster ATX case from supermicro, because i wanted space to expand.
The point? I know how it feels to want to upgrade instead of buy a new one. I decieded against upgrading, when I realized that I could buy a new 3ghz system at walmart, for rather little and two 1ghz chips wouldn't give me the same speed. The 80mb SCSI that my system supported looks childish now in some ways, and why would I spend 4x as much for SCSI drives to match it (and get multiple of them for RAID) vs getting the fastest IDE drives, and an IDE raid card?
So I got a new G4 (which I thought might have been a bad idea since the new G5s are coming out, but it turns out they don't support the Digi 001 card due to a voltage issue on the mobo), and thought to turn the old system into just a linux box. Well I can't really justify pulling it out and spending much money on it, when my mac does pretty much everything I need. I even have an HP laptop here that I haven't turned on since I got my mac except to use Excel once. Perhaps i'll get a few 9gb SCSI drives and new processors for my PC and make it a rendering station for Maya or something, but who knows. It's almost cheaper to get solid state memory now then get a few scsi drives...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Well, I've got some advice and some experience. If you see this post and want to chat, reply to this post and I'll give you my email address.
What makes me a good person to talk too?
My main machine was puchased as a
266/G3 beige mini-tower
32MB RAM
4 GB Hard Drive
OS 8.6
Now it's a
533/G4
768MB RAM
1 60 GB (EIDE), 1 17 GB (EIDE) 1 8GB (external SCSI) Hard Drives
OS 9.2.3, 10.1.5, and 10.2.6 on separate partitions.
Also with:
A 5-port Firewire PCI card
A 5-port USB 2 PCI card
A Radeon 7000 card.
An external USB CD-RW
So it's probably as upgraded as any computer like it has ever been.
What makes me really uniqely qualified to discuss this is that I'm also the caretaker of my Dad's machine, which is the identical machine in its original configuration, except for upgraded RAM to 384, and running OS 10.2.6
Now, let's see- my Dad's machine, not upgraded, really does run 10.2.6 fine. It's not that slow, it doesn't seem to bother my parents. If you want to do word-processing, email, and web-browsing, and don't need to be on the machine for 8 hours a day, it's really fine the way it is.
But I run a graphic arts business. I usually have Photoshop and 4-5 other big programs open at once, going back and forth between them, all day. My upgraded computer can still handle this.
But I've been putting those upgrades in one-at-a-time as I went. The people who said it would be dumb to do all those upgrades at once right now are right- it would be better to get a new machine. G4's are a great deal right now, Apple's trying to clear them out for G5's. And of course, G5's are awesome, if expensive.
OS 10.2 won't run reliably on my upgraded smorgasboard of a computer. It's VERY stable on my Dad's not-upgraded machine, but on my machine, after many problems, I wiped the partition I was installing on (which was an 8GB or less partition at the front of the first disk on the IDE chain, per Apple instructions), and did a clean install from the 10.2 CD's. I restarted, and left and came back 20 minutes later. The machine had crashed. Restarted and updated to 10.2.5. Came back later, the machine had crashed. That's how unstable 10.2 is on it, a clean install, with no modifications, crashes every 20 minutes or so. 10.1.5 is very stable though, and that's what I use. I maintain a 10.2.x partition on the external SCSI drive, so I can install updates on it and see if any of them don't crash.
A note about upgrading RAM- there are posts above with a bunch of stuff about getting half-height RAM- that only applies to the desktop, not the mini-tower. Also, almost all the motherboard revisions allow for 768 MB of RAM, but it has to be the right number of chips per RAM card for the motherboard to address them, otherwise 256MB RAM cards just show up as 128MB. I think it's 16 chips per 256MB cards you need. Also, someone said you need some special voltage or something- that's hogwash too, these are just PC-100 cards. Anything that says PC-100 and has the right number of chips will work. I like to get it from Other World Computing . Anyway, let me know if you decide to go the upgrading route and have any questions,
-Tom.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
The required ram, video card, processor and hard drive ugrades to make your experience not suck royally, will cost you more than a good used mac on cragslist.org
Requirements
Get a G4 of at least 500 Mhz.
512 meg of ram - 1Gig recommended
DUAL PROCESSORS ARE BETTER - they lessen the performance drain when the machine gets working hard
Fast video card with at least 16 meg of ram (32 + preferred)
FAST hard drive. Partition one for your swap space with 1 G allocated for swap.
Or you can think of things this way.
I have a 1G Ti running 10.2.6. For crunching video, it zipps. But for general use, the UI feels sluggish. I also have system, 9.2.2 and several other macs from a 266 G3 powerbook running 8.5, a G3 500 pb running 9.2.2, and so on. The 266 pb running 8.5 actually feels faster than the Ti when paying attention to the GUI.
Booting the Ti back to 9.2.2 is a JOY since everything in the GUI just seems so much faster.
Unless you have a compelling reason to go with Jaguar I'd stay right where you are.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
got a 333 mhz running fine i even putted a firewire & 100t network card in it en connected al my drives... 2 scsi 8 gb and 1 firewire 40 gb just fill it up with mp3 and i have a decent 'soundsystem', since my brandnew iPod was stolen from out off my tent :/
only problem is the videocard, characters have jagged edges...
floppy-drive doesn't work :/
anyway maybe i'll buy a silent powersupply...
try making it a linux box and get something with more horses. to run photoshop and have a good time of it, use 9 or get a new box.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
You've had a lot of people say don't bother, which is not that helpful really.
Here's what I recommend
Regards,
Greg
I've turned a beige G3 running Jaguar into a "jukebox" music server. In addition to streaming mp3's to individual macs, it is hooked up to a stereo system. I'm running it "headless," controlling it with the excellent netTunes shareware program. It seems to be able to comfortably play one song through the stereo while streaming a different song.
Do you need OS-X or would you just like it? Your machine isn't going to cope. plain and simple. my g4-500 is just coping. I can't afford a new machine, because I've only paid off half the loan for that one.
if you want OS-X, I recommend new hardware. if you can't afford a new box, and can't get a bank loan, then stick with OS9. Your apps are working, people are still going to release software for OS9, and you will have time to start saving.
Hell, people are still using C=64's in this day and age. it works for them. they can do what they need. that's fine.
your other option is to go the x86 way. buy a cheap 2nd hand 300-500mhz intel/amd box and run linux or windows on it.
but don't do it because you feel you should. Do it because you need to.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
My gosh, what a bunch of snobs responded to this guy's question.
I am posting this from a Biege G3/266 352Meg RAM 6GIG ata drive and both a 3 gig and 8 gig scsi drives all in the one box. I am running Mac OS-X 10.2.6 right now, on 3 20" monitors. I have been useing this machine sine Mac OS-X Beta, It's FINE!
It is a rev 1 motherboard and rev 1 ROM and it does have 1 256MEG DIMM in it and 2 other ones.. total = 352 MEG so the can only have 128's is not true.. I did have to try 3 256MEG DIMMs to find one that worked so it is picky.
I find that clasic apps run faster in clasic than they did booting directly into OS 9 (better disk I/O, I think). And they are more stable too (probably because less stuff coing on in clasic than when OS-9 standalone)
I do unix application development so I really like the BSD under-pinnings.
I agree with the general wisdom that the OS-X GUI is horrabbly slow, but other than resizing windows it dosn't annoy me.
The Safari browser is excellent, I rarely use my old standby , netscape 4.8 any more.. but when nessisary it runs fine under classic.
Your patience for slow software is monk-like.
I have a G3/500Mhz/768MB powerbook, and Jaguar sent me running back to linux quickfast.
Jaguar is nice on my Dual G4, but it is WAAYY to slow compared to Linux/X11 on the 'book.
I didn't find the application particularly stable, the X server was a dog on a G4, and the kernel/libs/apps codebase was getting old in '99. There was an OS 9-related patch that year, and nothing since. Out of shear laziness, I'm still on the support maillist. I've gotten maybe 5 emails since '00, most of which asked if "anyone still here?"
Luke, help me take this mask off
Within a week of coming back from the shop, the video crapped out. Fortunately, they took the fall and fixed it no charge. After upgrading from X.1 to X.2, the video got weird again, but an Apple firmware patch fixed it.
Odd, the 'Kihei' codename. What's next, 'Lahaina'?
Luke, help me take this mask off
I have the same computer, and here is what I did while I waited to get my g4:
:)
Overclocked the processor to 300mhz, and overclocked the system bus to 83mhz (up from 66). Added 64 megs of ram (so, thats 128 total), and added a better graphics card.
Remember, you need at least 8 megs video ram to run quartz extreme - and you DEFINATELY want this.
Once you have all that done, it'll run decent. Not nearly as fast as it will run os9, or power pc linux. But, its osx
Enjoy
QuarkXPress 6 system requirements
Mac OS
Software
Mac OS X v10.2 (Jaguar) or later
Hardware
CD-ROM drive for installation
Minimum 128MB total RAM
230MB available hard disk space for QuarkXPress installation
TCP/IP network for site license (using Quark License Administrator)
No, I get spoiled in a hurry, just like you. Once you've used a faster system, it's hard to go back to a slower one. The difference in responsiveness may only be a hundred milliseconds, and have virtually no impact on actual productivity, but its annoyance factor far exceeds its actual impact on your time. If you can perceive the difference in speed then it's too much. You rapidly forget how that very same computer would have seemed blazingly fast two or three years ago.
1) I don't think the built-in SCSI is supported (I couldn't get it to recognize a SCSI scanner). I haven't tried the floppy.
Built in SCSI works. I'm using an old G3 266 as a Retrospect backup server hooked to a poor man's autoloader (three tape drives I got off eBay) and it's booting off a SCSI hard drive.
The built in floppy is not supported; OS X does not come with a driver for it. If you really need the internal floppy, and don't want to spend money on a USB floppy drive (and USB card, as the beige G3 does not have USB) you can try this. I don't know if it works because I don't use floppies.
this is my sig
I was looking for a thread to contribute to but there are so many saying the same thing: dump your box and get a new one. Whatever!
You need to run new versions of your dtp apps, that's why you're upgrading to OS X, right? (--no other compelling reason if it's a moneymaking production machine... otherwise just heed the advice to stick with what you have.)
So get a used video card that will do Quartz-- an ATI Rage 128 pro w/ 16mb of VRAM is your minimum -- and get a minimum of 320MB of RAM, plus a larger hard drive. That's it, really! About US$250 and you're in.
Skip USB or firewire cards unless you need them for scanners/printers, backup devices, or a tablet. If you have an A/V personality card in there it won't work, but you don't use it anyway, most likely.
Partition the new drive with the first partition 8GB for OSX, a 2GB partition for OS9, and the rest for your big docs.
I work all day with A/V production quality G4's, but most of the work I wind up doing (standard Adobe/Macromedia production apps, and basic video prep) is on a 366MHz G3 iBook with 320MB of RAM, 8MB video, a weeny 800x600 screen, and a 20GB HD. Yeah it's a slow interface compared to OS 9, but it runs for months without a reboot and I never wait for an application, I just switch apps. The reboot/stability thing has saved lots of time itself, so on average over the course of a year I'd say OS X is faster on this machine than 9. Oh, and invest a few pennies in LaunchBar for real keyboard speed, unless you're a mouser.
Productivity is between the ears and hands, people, more than CPU's. I know a very skilled book/logo designer making a handsome living using OS 8.6, Quark3, Photoshop4, on a 250MHz 604e machine.
Damn those pesky terrorists
And it's slow as hell. I set it up for my mom because it was easier for her to use X than 9 and given that I can remotely fix any problems she has, X was a lot better.
However. It's slow as hell. You cannot use it if you use a computer for more than 20 minutes a day because it's really unbearable sometimes. Running 1 program at a time is somewhat ok, but if you have multiple programs and switch between them you get spinning cursor of death for a good 30 seconds.
Just know, it's very very slow.
The machine I run here is:
:)
G3/300 w/768mb memory
firewire/usb 2.0 combo card
Radeon 7000 w/32MB
120GB internal
external 12x8x32x CDRW
Just need to upgrade the processor... then it's time to get me a G5.
"I'm not ashamed I can't function in society like I'm supposed to." - Paul Westerberg
I simply had to have the last beige Apple. I bought a G3/233 mini-tower on Low-End-Mac's trading list. $99.
;)
128mb stick RAM (free, laying around), plus 64mb standard, total 192MB.
Installed Jaguar ($50 used) using an ATAPI DVD Drive (free, borrowed from a PC).
Installed $19 USB card for EyeTV and printer.
This thing can capture VCD quality video using EyeTV, while playing net radio in iTunes. No skips in either the captured video or radio playback.
OS/X response is laggy but decent. I was surprised how responsive the transparent terminal windows were when moved around...
I'm about to buy another beige, this one with a G4/466 XLR8 upgrade... wee!
PS I have an ADB fetish.
This comes from someone who runs GNU/Linux on old Mac hardware (Powermac 6400 with 80 MB of RAM).
Free software will help your in the walet and provide you freedoms Apple do not provide under Mac OS.
I have enjoyed a pretty snappy OS since I moved from Mac OS 9.
"They say travel broadens the mind, so I went over the falls in a barrel." -Thomas Dolby
How'd you get the firewire and usb to work. In my experience OSX just ignored my cards and what drivers that were avaiable didn't work. What brand cards did you use? Marcos
I ran OS X (starting with 10.0.3, then 10.1.x) on a Beige G3 266 at work for a couple years. I also ran 10.1 on my home beige G3/300 for quite a while. It was as slow as death. I also thought it was painfully slow on my non-QuartzExtreme Dual-533 MHz G4. IMNSHO, OS X is horrible on any non-QE Mac. It runs better on an 800 MHz G3 iBook with QE than on a dual-533 without.
Whenever I would post these sentiments on macslash, idiots would come out of the woodwork telling me to quit spreading FUD and that OS X ran "peppy enough" on their unsupported 9600. So, if you're OK dealing with an OS that takes a painful amount of time to run (like 5 seconds to launch Terminal; a Finder that feels like its underwater) then go ahead. If not, don't even run OS X on anything beige or blue & white except as a file or web server. (Which it's great at--OS X will serve files 4x faster (yes, I've timed it) than Personal File Sharing under OS 9.)
Save up and get an iBook or eMac which are currently give the best bang for the buck.
eMac: pro: G4, superdrive available. con: big, heavy, built-in monitor.
iBook: pro: portable, slick, 1024x768, CD-RW/DVD option. con: G3. But, as I said, QE makes it quite usable.
Both are in the $700-$1200 range depending on if you get them refurbished or not and what kind of options you order.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
From Apple's specifications web site in the "mini-tower" biege G3 entry:
,
DIMMs must be: 3.3 volt(V) unbuffered, 64-bit wide, 168-pin 100MHz/10ns cycle time or faster
From the PC100 specs: 100MHz/CL=2 3.3v unbuffered, 64bit 168pin
Where exactly is the difference? Where are you reading specs for a G3 that uses 5v memory?
I have put PC100 DIMMS in both machines (desktop and mini-tower) in CPU speeds of 233 to 333 and PC100 has worked in each one of them. In my experience, there is zero reason to spend extra money on anything claiming to be "special" or "proprietary" Mac G3 memory.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
[rant]I've used beige Macs. The G3 is Platinum, not Beige[/rant]
I'm running Jaguar quite happily on a G3/300 with a rev C motherboard. Of course, I've made quite a few upgrades since I bought it new.
* Upgraded VRAM from 2MB to 6MB, then later installed ATI Radeon Mac Edition video card.
* Upgraded memory, first from 64MB to 128MB and now at 256MB.
* Added Maxtor 30GB hard drive. Rev C allows two IDE hard drives, but you need a new IDE cable for them. I got mine custom built, and also had to get the drive sled to mount it in the empty drive bay above the Zip drive.
The 30GB hard drive has OS 9 on it, the 6GB is my OS X drive. This has the side benifit that I can set OS X as the default boot, and I can select OS 9 on startup simply by holding down the 'C' key without a CD in the drive.
* At the time I was using a DeskWriter 550C which has no OS X drivers, and OS X doesn't support serial port printers. I haven't tried to get it to work with CUPS yet, as I got a LaserWriter from a friend and a LaserWriter IIg motherboard (which has on board Ethernet) on eBay.
So, the question is, is it worth it? If you're going to be using the old versions of these apps and running in Classic, no. If you're upgrading to the OS X native versions, maybe, but probably only as a stopgap until you get a new computer.
If, like me, you spend most of your time using free or low cost apps (AppleWorks, Mail, AIM, ICQ, OmniWeb, iTunes, etc) and found having a Unix command line helpful for computer science courses, yes.
End of Line.