400Mhz iMacs

[Man In Black]

How usable are the 400Mhz iMacs? I know if it was a PC, it would only be good for internet surfing, and email-word processing, that sort of thing. Being a Mac, is it able to do more, or is it about equivalent?
Thanks!

 

[Heb1228]

Slightly more usable. Load it up on RAM and it will do ok.

 

[grapes911]

My parents have a 400MHz G3 Power Mac and it doesn't do much more than email, web browsing, MS office, etc. It does all these things fine, but Photoshop 7 was unusable.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Limitation - they have either a CD-ROM or a DVD-ROM, no burner, and the slot load optical drives are neither easy nor cheap to upgrade.
They will however take up to 1 Gb of PC100/133 DIMMs, and that is easy to install. The DV models would be more desirable because they have Firewire. The non-DV models with USB1.1 only are a drag to attach mass storage to. The 15" screen is decent enough.

I would say a 400 MHz iMac DV with 1 Gb RAM and either Jaguar or Panther would be quite viable for many tasks. Certainly I have done Photoshop and Quark professionally on much weaker machines. It will run most programs, including audio and video editing, just slower than the current lineup.

Remember too, you don't necessarily have to use the latest version of a program to get the job done.

 

[Man In Black]

Limitation - they have either a CD-ROM or a DVD-ROM, no burner, and the slot load optical drives are neither easy nor cheap to upgrade.
They will however take up to 1 Gb of PC100/133 DIMMs, and that is easy to install. The DV models would be more desirable because they have Firewire. The non-DV models with USB1.1 only are a drag to attach mass storage to. The 15" screen is decent enough.

I would say a 400 MHz iMac DV with 1 Gb RAM and either Jaguar or Panther would be quite viable for many tasks. Certainly I have done Photoshop and Quark professionally on much weaker machines. It will run most programs, including audio and video editing, just slower than the current lineup.

Remember too, you don't necessarily have to use the latest version of a program to get the job done.

Meh, I was just wondering, because I need a newer machine to replace my 200Mhz Pentium MMX, and I noticed on eBay I can get a 400Mhz iMac or a 1Ghz+ PC for about the same price (those macs really hold their value, lol).

 

[Heb1228]

A 1-1.5 GHz PC and a 400-500 MHz iMac are comparable computers speed-wise.

 

[Mechcozmo]

A 1-1.5 GHz PC and a 400-500 MHz iMac are comparable computers speed-wise.

Depends on the app... if you are running Win98 on the PC with optimized software it would blow away the Mac. But if you have OS 8.6 on the Mac with that era of software, it would blow away the PC.

As a general rule, Macs tend to be faster clock-for-clock compared to PCs.

 

[Pittsax]

I can't speak for the 400 MHz iMacs, but I'm using a 400 MHz Pismo laptop as my primary work computer, and it runs apps like all the Adobe CS programs quite well. In fact, the only program I've tried that brought it to its knees was GeneSpring, which is used to analyze gene expression arrays (read: a lot of data...some of the input files are 5 MB .txt files)

 

[homerjward]

I can't speak for the 400 MHz iMacs, but I'm using a 400 MHz Pismo laptop as my primary work computer, and it runs apps like all the Adobe CS programs quite well. In fact, the only program I've tried that brought it to its knees was GeneSpring, which is used to analyze gene expression arrays (read: a lot of data...some of the input files are 5 MB .txt files)

love the quote in your sig. oh yeah, and it'll be alot more usable than a pc from that era/speed.

 

[uspcommuter]

Just got one upgrade the iMac DV/400 recently with maxed ram and a 80GB HD with 8MB cache. Well compared to a PC, its pretty smooth. Even if you have nothing upgraded but ram. You should do fine if you are not doing any heavy gaming or DV editing etc. Oh Tiger runs great on it too. Its way snappier than panther.