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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?"
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.
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.
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
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
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!
Well, I disagree with the parent to your post on a few points, too, but you need to double-check your stuff first, too:
Also Panther, X.3, has better support for the older Macs.Read: I've never actually done research on this, but if I use a gimmicky narrative, I'll sound accurate.
As a matter of fact, current developer seeds of Panther aren't supported on Macs that didn't come with built-in USB, which includes all beige G3s. Ten bucks says Panther isn't going to run on this guy's beige box, regardless of how you feel about that.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Check the revision of the logic board. If it's a rev 1 you can only put 384MB in. The slots only recognise 128MB even if you put a 256MB stick in them. Rev. 1: $77D.40F2 Rev. 2: $77D.45F1 Rev. 3: $77D.45F2 Look in the System Profiler. If you're rev 2 or better you can put in 768MB.
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.
Don't worry. Photoshop 1 does run in monochrome ! (It did on my mac Plus :-)
I completely agree...
You're looking at approx. $150 for RAM, $130 for OSX, $100 for a new HD (OSX needs 1.5GB on its own). That's near $400 right there! Does you're current mac even have a CDROM? Spend $500 on eBay and get a first rev eMac. Not worth the hassle.
Another way to look at it...
You have had this current Mac for how long? Assuming you are in the same financial boat you were in when bought it, I figure "bite the bullet" and finance a new one. Sure, you won't pay it off for 6+ years, but you obviously plan on keeping it that long anyway. And when you're done, you'll have used every penny of it and ready to buy a new one...just get the stupid G4/G5 and know you won't have waasted precious money.
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!
Hear, hear! An excellent article outlining all the necessary upgrades to make the beige G3 workable under Jaguar. Don't forget about the Quartz Extreme hack to get QE to work with the Radeon 7000. That's what I have in my blue and white G3. I would also like to note I have a PowerMac 7500 with 400MHz G3 upgrade card, ATI Rage 128, 256MB RAM, 9GB SCSI hard drive, and a USB card, and the system is quite workable. Not terribly fast, but it has no problems running applications like Photoshop. BTW: I used XPostFacto to install Jaguar onto this computer. Get XPF from http://otherworldcomputing.com/
I used my G3 266 as a trade-in on a G4 Cube. Dropped the price by a couple of hundred of dollars.
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.
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.
Geez. She asked how she can make her Beige a functional computer with Jaguar and Quark/Photoshop. Far be it that we might actually answer her question. My wife has the same exact setup for the same exact purpose. The CPU was overclocked to 300Mhz to get some more headroom for processing OSX and those two apps. The RAM was maxed at 768MB. A PCI Radeon Mac Edition was installed for better video performance. A FireWire/USB card was installed for peripherals. An ATA/66 controller was installed to get better HDD performance than the stock IDE controller and two drives attached for more storage. These upgrades set me back maybe $500 total and made this a functional Jaguar computer. The whole trick is making the best of what you have. My wife is close to getting a DP G5. These upgrades have extended the life of the machine and increased the resale value if and when I would want to spin it. Not that I plan on doing so. Make the best of what you have, no need to go into hoc for a new to you machine. Just my $.02
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 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
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.