12" G3 800mhz - What's it good for

[macsForLife]

Just had a friend give one to me that he's not using anymore. I am going to be needing one for school in the fall, but I'm not sure this will cut it. It has 10.3 on it now, I guess 10.4 is as far as I can go, which is too bad. Also, it has the ram maxed at 640MB, a 30 gb HD, wireless, a CD drive, a broken right speaker, and a missing Caps Lock key Online video playback at even low resolutions is very choppy, boot up is super slow, and the battery seems to only have about 1.5 hours or so of life. Is it worth it to try and scrape along with it for a month or two? The way I see it, I either need a new internal or external drive, because my music collection is at 55+ gigs, and I have about 130 gigs of movies, and a couple in pictures. It seems like it's about as fast as it's gonna get, unless it gets a bigger HD. But it seems that to spend $100 to put in a useful optical drive, $120 for a decent size HD, and then $100-$120 for a Newer Tech replacement battery seems like a lot of money on an old machine and still only be at about a fraction of the capabilities of a newer machine. I have a limited amount of money, so anybody can chime in here. Worth it to fix it up or should I try to sell it?

 

[Shake 'n' Bake]

Don't upgrade it. It isn't worth it. Sell it after a fresh install of Panther and save and get either a 13'' MacBook or MBP.

 

[JoeDRC]

Sell it, it would make a good project for someone & you'd get a tiny bit of cash towards a whitebook or MBP

 

[macsForLife]

Well I even have a copy of Tiger, I thought I would throw that on there, plus iWork 08 and iLife 08, and a copy of Office 04 and some good freeware (VLC, Flip, Firefox, etc.) and maybe that would help the value a little bit. Doesn't cost me anything so why not. Anywhere that I could pick up a key to replace my missing one? Or is that pretty hard to do.

 

[Eric S.]

This is an iBook G3? I had a 12" iBook G3. First it developed a well-known problem where the video would not work if the screen was open more than about 30 degrees. I got that fixed under warranty. Then after it was out of warranty the MB died. I didn't bother to fix it.

A MacInTouch study in January 2006 of iBook and Powerbook reliability concluded:

The iBook G3, which sold quite well, had the most failures of any Apple laptop we surveyed and the failures were critical (the motherboard): by affected percentage of models, the G3 iBooks were the worst by far, with more than half requiring logic board replacements. ... The white 12" iBook G3 series became much less reliable through its first five revisions, reaching a 73% failure percentage! The last revision dropped to a 49% failure percentage — much improved over the previous model, but still unconscionably high.

My advice would be don't spend any money on this machine. Save it for a new system.

 

[Shake 'n' Bake]

Take a look here.

 

[molala]

I had this exact same model that went through two logic board replacements within 15 months. I sold it after the second replacement (still had extended warranty). But maybe if yours is still OK now, it won't develop a major problem. I still wouldn't spend money on it though. Keep it if you just want to play with it. But if you need the money for a faster computer, sell it.

 

[Capt Underpants]

It's not worth upgrading. I think you could use it for the foreseeable future, though, if you freshly installed panther and got an external hard drive for your media.

It seems to me that your friend was trying to do something nice by giving you the laptop. Your friend could have sold it for some cash, but they decided to give it to you. Saying that, I don't think you should just turn around and sell it, unless you've talked with them about it and they're fine with it.

 

[NewMacbookPlz]

Makes for a good doorstop perhaps?

Seriously though, basic web surfing/email/office applications. Not much more than that as Flash will drag it to an absolute crawl as will video files of any resolution over 480i I'd imagine (maybe really compressed 480p will play).

 

[macsForLife]

It's not worth upgrading. I think you could use it for the foreseeable future, though, if you freshly installed panther and got an external hard drive for your media.

It seems to me that your friend was trying to do something nice by giving you the laptop. Your friend could have sold it for some cash, but they decided to give it to you. Saying that, I don't think you should just turn around and sell it, unless you've talked with them about it and they're fine with it.

Yeah that was kind of it, I don't want to really do that, but so far with what everybody has said, I might have to ask him about it. Unfortunately, since he got it from someone else and only used a couple times himself, he doesn't know the admin password, and so I have to do a reinstall, but I only have Tiger and I just realized that of course, it only has a CD drive. Is there any way to get it on there? Or am I sunk unless I find some Panther CDs? Even just to sell it, it would be a good idea to do a clean reinstall.