Need your advice - Buy a g4 or wait

[Muttster]

I am in the market for a new computer and could you some advice and suggestions.

I currently have a mini 1.25 with the 40 gig hd and 512k and no airport/bluetooth. I really don't want to put too much money into this so I thought about giving this to my daughters to use for surfing the net and word processing (and get rid of theirold Windows machine). I also have a Dell 20 inch widesctreen monitor that i use with this.

Now here is the question that I have. I can do one of three things. I can wait until the new minis come out, give my old mini to my daughters and get them a cheap monitor. I could also buy a 20 Imac but even with the educators price, I'm still in the 1300 range which is a little more than I want to spend. Finally, I could buy a powermac g4 in the 733 and up range on Ebay (preferably with dual processors) and max out the ram. I like the fact they they can be upgraded and have plenty of room for additional hard drives and the like. Is there any processor or machine that i should look for?

I use my computer primarily for internet, word processing, music and the very occasional home video. I have never used a g4 othe than my mini so I don't know what kind of performance hit I would take. The speed of my mini is acceptable but the 512k memory is killing me.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Scarlet Fever]

i've made many movies using iMovie on a computer much slower than that

It'll be great for word processing and internet browsing, and ok for home movies.

If you can, i reckon wait till the C2D minis come out, and buy a refurbished CD model. They won't be much more expensive than the G4 mini, and they will have much better overall specs.

 

[livingfortoday]

If you can wait, I would wait. You could always just op in a 1GB stick the Mini for the interim, it should give you a nice little speed boost. If you don't definitely need a 20" screen, you can get a refurb 17" C2D iMac for $799, too.

And if you're feeling gutsy, you could pop open the Mini, take out the logic board, pop off one resistor, and have it run at 1.5Ghz. I did that to my girlfriend's 1.25Ghz G4, and it added a little pep.

 

[siurpeeman]

i would wait. it's much better having an intel mac at this point, as future powerpc support will be on the decline, particularly from 3rd parties. as an example, adobe cs3 is said to be intel-only.

 

[livingfortoday]

as an example, adobe cs3 is said to be intel-only.

Not so:

The Mac version is a Universal Binary, and system requirements call for a 1+ GHz G4 or G5 or any Intel-based Mac with 512MB of RAM.

A G4 will still be a very capable machine (I'm on a 450Mhz G4 right now), but a C2D will be MUCH more future-proof, and much faster if you're doing anything CPU-intensive.

 

[siurpeeman]

Not so

you're right, my mistake. i was thinking of the adobe creative suite production studio and not cs3. but the point remains--powerpc support will be dropping. i think it'll happen a lot sooner than people expect.

 

[weg]

Finally, I could buy a powermac g4 in the 733 and up range on Ebay (preferably with dual processors) and max out the ram.

Whatever people tell you about the 'G4 being a capable processor', I wouldn't buy one anymore. Basically, there's been no progress in the development of this processor since several years, and no software company is going to spend money on optimizing software for this processor. There's a reason why Apple doesn't use that processor anymore - go for Intel. I'm using a Powerbook G4 at home, and its speed is ridiculously slow compared to my Intel processor at my office..