The iMac G3 Challenge

Lil Chillbil said:

I have decided to power down all of my other macs and just use my faithful g3 for all of my daily task for 72 hours starting at 5pm today until 5pm friday and report my findings

anyway time to turn off this computer see you guys on the other side

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What are the specs? I have the highest clock G3 Apple made, I could do pretty well.

Ahh... just as a reference, I have a base model Summer 2000 Indigo 350MHz iMac I picked up for about $10 recently, benches below:

Geekbench: 188
OpenMark: 115
Xbench: 10.55

HD performance? Decimated by every other Mac.

No Firewire or wireless on my model, IIRC, I shared the Airport internet connection from my G5 tower over Ethernet to fully update Tiger. Also uninstalled Java and Flash.

Curious as to how a game like Quake or the original Unreal Tournament would perform, may have to check that out tonight...

Yeah, there's no way it's running YouTube, and that has nothing to do with bandwidth. Most YouTube issues with PPC Macs have little to do with bandwidth and everything to do with Flash. I believe there's something called MacTubes you could try, but a 400 MHz G3 might only have enough power for the lowest quality videos.

Maybe I'll give it a try sometime with my 600mhz Snow iMac. I have used the 500mhz Cube for a few days straight though

with the right software, some mobile websites all can be done or almost =)

I've used an iBook Clamshell (Close enough to an iMac ) exclusively for ~3 months, so...

It's not that hard to get it to play YouTube, just use the mobile version and play it through QuickTime. iCab on Panther with JavaScript off should render most sites quickly enough, and when it doesn't, the mobile version is usually fine. Also, the Panther version of Camino isn't that bad, and it crashes a lot less than iCab. There are a couple lightweight office suites for 10.3. Adium works nicely for FaceBook Chat, and any IRC client should be lightweight enough. SeaShore is a nice image editing app and runs nicely on slower G3's.

Its an awesome idea to challenge yourself in this way, if only that it makes you appreciate faster machines and more speed when and if you go back to them.

A few months ago I challenged myself to a week with this and only this machine:

Compaq Presario 1200 laptop
Pentium II 266 mhz
192 MB RAM
2 MB video RAM
6 GB HD

Tried several different OS's, settled on ConnochaetOS, a Arch Linux based distro designed for ancient machines like this. With it I had up to date mplayer, IceCat (firefox rebranded for a free OS), a minimalist webkit browser (XXXterm), abiword and gnumeric. I found that I could still watch youtube vids (3GP and 240p) if I downloaded the file in IceCat and played it back through mplayer with some command line tweaks. The machine was responsive if not fast. System used 30 MB of RAM when idle, I never seemed to run out of RAM even with several applications open. Shockingly, I didn't really miss my Dell D620 or ibook G4. In the end I gave away the laptop to a starving student who promptly sold it for 50 bucks cause she couldn't put itunes on it. Never again.

Lil Chillbil said:

I put it on craigslist and sold it in an hour for $50

So there goes that challenge

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Actually if you got $50 for a G3, I'd call that a major win!

Wow. Things sure have advanced. My iPod scores between 6-700 in geekbench.

Considering the iPad can play HD video extremely smooth along with YouTube and get 10hrs battery is amazing in itself.

Lil Chillbil said:

yeah I know

I'm now saving up for a new baseline imac

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That'll be easy. Just sell 64 more G3s!

I have a PC I should try that on I built in 1999. I think it has a bad power supply but I think I have a spare. Would be interesting.

Man, you guys go on and on and on and on about YouTube so much. I probably watch a video on there TWICE or less a month.

monkeybagel said:

I have a PC I should try that on I built in 1999. I think it has a bad power supply but I think I have a spare. Would be interesting.

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Old mac's are a lot more usable in today's world than old PCs. Not to mention that an Old PC is a virus-magnet. Even windows XP, which wouldn't run well on that PC has security holes that will never be patched.

Jessica Lares said:

Man, you guys go on and on and on and on about YouTube so much. I probably watch a video on there TWICE or less a month.

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Same here. I will likely never understand why people have such a hard on for YouTube.

Intell said:

Same here. I will likely never understand why people have such a hard on for YouTube.

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I use it, though not that often. And I wouldn't base my setup on whether or not it plays well with YouTube.

You can find things on YouTube that are difficult to find elsewhere. Like the Knicks-Lakers finals in 1970. Also plenty of full-length concerts and films/documentaries that are easier to find there instead of Googling your time away.

I also don't use Facebook all that much, but people seem to find entertainment on both sites.

My 350Mhz power mac can watch 1080p youtube videos off of mactubes.

spyguy10709 said:

Old mac's are a lot more usable in today's world than old PCs. Not to mention that an Old PC is a virus-magnet. Even windows XP, which wouldn't run well on that PC has security holes that will never be patched.

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Not sure about that. We'll see. I'll probably put Window 7 x86 on it

Intell said:

Same here. I will likely never understand why people have such a hard on for YouTube.

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YouTube is an invaluable source of information, and can be somewhat entertaining, although I find the majority of the "comedy" stuff on there immature and stupid. However, the educational stuff and product reviews are very interesting to me.

monkeybagel said:

Not sure about that. We'll see. I'll probably put Window 7 x86 on it

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Hopefully that was a joke...

Win7 on a ~1999 computer...