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Bought a Quicksilver G4, Now what?

C

claimed4all

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 26, 2008
414
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Bought my parents a used Quicksilver, G4 867, 1gig of memory and leopard installed. The computer will be used for internet browsing on a 300kbs connection, light itunes and a heavy iPhoto library. Should I upgrade anything or should that be enough power. The one upgrade I was thinking about is the 1.6mhz upgrade from sonnet. I am moving them from a P4 2.4 Dell Workstation to this so I know its probably slightly slower, but thats probably going to be alright.

Also is there any nice way of moving from Adobe Photo Album to iPhoto without having to recategorize photos? Have about 10,000-12,000 photos, the only think I can think of is bring them all in and autosplit, that will probably get me there half way. What do you guys think?
 
2 upgrades (in addition to maxing da ram & CPU) that will really help are:

A) SATA controller card + big fast HDD's, which will drastically speed up data access/transfers, which will make the overall system perform better

B) Radeon 9800 video card, mainly for speeding up the GUI and screen effects in Leopard.....
 
SmurfBoxMasta said:
2 upgrades (in addition to maxing da ram & CPU) that will really help are:

A) SATA controller card + big fast HDD's, which will drastically speed up data access/transfers, which will make the overall system perform better

B) Radeon 9800 video card, mainly for speeding up the GUI and screen effects in Leopard.....
Click to expand...

I know that will make leopard more peppy, but is it truly needed? Bought this for $100, so I am trying to make this a low cost investment. If I said I only had another $200 to spend, what you spend it on for the uses I originally listed? Or am I better to just not really invest in a machine this old, let them use it and buy them a used intel in another year or two?
 
claimed4all said:
I know that will make leopard more peppy, but is it truly needed? Bought this for $100, so I am trying to make this a low cost investment. If I said I only had another $200 to spend, what you spend it on for the uses I originally listed? Or am I better to just not really invest in a machine this old, let them use it and buy them a used intel in another year or two?
Click to expand...

Overall i'd say that the computer will feel slower than the Pentium 4 they were using before, especially when tons of images come into play. I don't know what video card is inside the G4 right now, but i'd personally get a $40 Geforce 6200 and flash the BIOS to work on the G4. 1gb of RAM might be decent, but more will help. You can also upgrade the hard drive for like $50-60 to something more modern. There is an OSX simple hack to get it to work with larger than 128gb drives. Do a search for it. All of that should easily cost under $200.
 
claimed4all said:
Or am I better to just not really invest in a machine this old, let them use it and buy them a used intel in another year or two?
Click to expand...

Yes. Buy a newer Intel Mac. The old G4 is great for some one who wants a toy toplay with and like upgrades and ebay bargain hunting but if the idea is to USE the computer then just buy a Mini or an iMac.

A low spec G4 is not going to by very fun to use. Spend money in this order:
  1. Buy more RAM, as much as you can
  2. Buy a faster/bigger disk drive
  3. Better/faster vidio card

RAM will help the most.
 
claimed4all said:
I know that will make leopard more peppy, but is it truly needed? Bought this for $100, so I am trying to make this a low cost investment. If I said I only had another $200 to spend, what you spend it on for the uses I originally listed? Or am I better to just not really invest in a machine this old, let them use it and buy them a used intel in another year or two?
Click to expand...

If I had the option of spending $300 on an antique QS, OR spending a bit more for an intel Mini, I would go for the Mini in a heartbeat......even a base model will be way faster than the QS, even WITH every possible upgrade mentioned here.

Plus the fact that the intel macs can also run windblows, so if your parents have peecee programs that they are well-versed on, they could continue to run them without any big pains.....
 
Thanks for the tips, think I am just going to rough if on it for 6 months then get them an upgrade if they like the mac. Like I said though, light usage so I think all will be ok. Thanks.
 
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