iMac G3 for downloading?

[mutantteenager]

Try and haggle it as low as you can go. It should suit your purposes well, but for a small amount of money, it should be a hassle free experiment.

If you were using it for browsing, most of the web would work, but flash sites and youtube used to kill my ibook G3.

 

[drewdle]

Yup, I checked it on Wikipedia and 7.7.1 is the last version supported on Panther. Video downloads became available in 4.8 so i SHOULD be able to download tv shows on iTunes, right?

I was thinking about just upgrading the internal drive to an 80GB and then i realized that I would have to reinstall Panther. Does Apple still sell older operating systems? Or would i be better off getting it from torrents or something.

Safari should work, but does anyone know if JDownloader will?

You can download them, certainly. But they won't play. Content from Apple is encoded in H.264 which requires more processing power to play than regular MPEG4. My G4/700 cannot play back purchased videos properly. Even though it's pushing the limits of the hardware, I'd upgrade to Tiger. Stuff 1Gb of memory in there, and it should run decently. Still no purchased video playback. You'll need a higher end G4 or better for that.

To get Tiger you'd need to either buy it online, or download it, although generally everyone around here frowns on us suggesting the download route. Frankly, my opinion on that is if Apple sold the damn software, they wouldn't have to deal with people pirating it, but because they insist on forcing users through their accelerated upgrade cycle, they get people seeking alternate methods.

 

[chocolate632]

Thanks for the response guys! I bought the iMac (G4 actually) and set it up. It runs Tiger, but its incredibly slow. Other than that, it works perfectly for what I want it to do. I'm pretty sure it has USB 1.1 because the transfer speeds are ridiculously slow. I never realized how easily Macs can talk to each other! I can just go on my main iMac and connect to the G4 and transfer the files wirelessly at 3x the speed. Works beautifully, thanks for the input!

 

[MacHamster68]

congrats tasteful choice , and yes the iMac g4 has usb 1.1 if you have one below 1 ghz ,only the 1 ghz 15" , 1.25 ghz 17 "and 20" had usb 2.0 i always use firewire as thats even faster then usb2.0 ,
my iMac g3 outperforms my intel iMac core duo if i connect a harddrive with usb2.0 on the iMac and a other harddrive with firewire onto my iMac g3 and transfer the same film, the iMac g3 has it first i just love firewire