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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?"
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?
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 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 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 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 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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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'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.
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.