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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
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.
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.