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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?"
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 got a Beige G3 specifically to test OS X on as I didn't want to make the plunge and spend $1000s on something I didn't know for certain would be for me. The G3 is fine... but it has 440Mb of RAM, an upgraded CPU (a 433MHz G4, but I recommend getting a faster G3 instead, cheaper G4 upgrades are a bugger to configure), and a recent fast & big, 7200rpm, 40Gb, HD. Those upgrades all made it snappy enough to run Jaguar.
That doesn't make it perfect, obviously, but right now the only thing that's not as smooth as it could be is the video.
Be aware that the Radeon 9200PCI is unlikely to work. The recommended upgrades for the PCI G3s are the Radeon 7000 Mac Edition, Radeon 7500 Mac Edition, and ATI Rage 128. The latter is fairly old, the middle is hard to get, but the former is relatively easy to find. Make sure you order the "Mac Edition" version of the card - it's not a marketing gimmick, the wrong card will contain the wrong firmware and your card will not boot up.
Overall, you're looking at about $300-400 to upgrade the disk ($50-100), RAM ($50), and CPU ($200) of a Beige G3 to something usable, and another $100-150 on top of that to do the video card if you also want to do that. That's not cheap, but it's less than a third of the cost of a baseline PowerMac G4, and less than half the cost of an unupgradable Mac. It's worth doing if you don't need the power right now.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.