Impressions: 10.5 on a 400Mhz G4 Gigabit

[gammamonk]

I installed 10.5 on the spare G4 tower kicking around the office. I slapped 896Megs of ram in her, and a newish 40gig drive. I installed 10.5 via the Target-Disk-Mode-Method. Install took around 1.5 hours.

The machine boots up fine and has been rock solid. It is a bit pokey, I'm not going to lie to you. I think once I flash a spare Radeon 7000 card to mac and swap it with the Rage128 it will be much better. The Rage sucks so hard I can't even run screensavers.

I just finished installing Office 2004. I have plenty of ram to run whatever I need, but boy that 400Mhz hits hard. Load agerages: 4.13 3.23 2.67.

This was fun even if not all that useful. But hey, I'd like to see someone install Vista on a Pentium 3 450Mhz! (closest chip I know of).

 

[GimmeSlack12]

A bit too much time on our hands perhaps? Well, I guess in the end it is somewhat useful info.

 

[gammamonk]

I tried flashing my spare Radeon 7000 AGP card tonight, but it was a no go. The flashing program reported "No ATI card found." I really need a decent video card for the machine to be viable.

I have a Geforce2mx -- couldn't flash, 64KB ROM too small
ATI 7000 -- couldn't flash, didn't work
2x Geforce4mx -- no flash exists?

I'm going to go dig around my roommates' old junker PCs in the basement looking for gold.

 

[disconap]

For that machine I suggest an FX5200 or similar (that's what I flashed for our office G4 sawtooth). Cheap and efficient (you can probably get one for around $20 these days).

 

[Eidorian]

I'll have to check the load on my Power Mac G4s now.

 

[rhyndu]

looks at the iMac G3 with a safari 3 under leopard running... um... chugging along. Ha!



(The Ha! is my lame effort at a joke. No flames please!)

 

[kolax]

I remember when I had Windows XP running on an old 166MHz banger about 6 years ago, and played games like Unreal Tournament and Half Life.

Got used to crappy fps and was quite good banter!