old gear for sale

[jefhatfield]

i have a freind who wants to sell his old G3 beige desktop to me for 350 dollars and the machine has 192 mb of ram/4 gb hd/no usb

is something like this 1997 era machine still capable of anything or is this machine too old?

will it run os x?

 

[cleo]

My (highly uneducated, I admit) guess would be that OS X should run ok, if slow... just because iBooks run it acceptably with a G3 and 192 RAM. Probably not good for anything but web surfing, Word, etc... but that's not nothing.

 

[britboy]

according to the osx requirements page, that will run just fine. It is at round about the minimum requirements, so no doubt will run slowly.

Enjoy

 

[Hemingray]

That's a pretty good deal. And you could easily add firewire/usb connectivity with a combo card for about $60.

The beige G3's are an excellent linking model between the Old World and New World Apple technologies. As for ports, you get all the old stuff like serial and 10base-T ethernet, plus the newer stuff like 100base-T ethernet, FireWire and USB is available for it too. I know also that the G3 towers came with audio and video in/out, the desktops might have that too.

 

[MacAztec]

hey J!

Hmmm...it wont run OS X very quickly. I think that thing has a 66MHz bus, and it cant be over 333MHz. I think you should spend an extra 500 dollars and put a G4 in that puppy!

 

[IndyGopher]

Originally posted by MacAztec
Hmmm...it wont run OS X very quickly. I think that thing has a 66MHz bus, and it cant be over 333MHz. I think you should spend an extra 500 dollars and put a G4 in that puppy!

I have to disagree with pretty much all of that...

If your CPU will behave (some will, some won't.. won't know 'til you try) the bus can be jumpered as high as 83MHz. (Without mucking up the PCI timing, so your cards will still work) with a more recent ZIF CPU (either upgrade, or one from a dead B&W machine) and 83MHz bus, you can make a VERY respectable OS X machine out of those beige puppies. The jumper settings are available from www.xlr8yourmac.com With a Radeon PCI video card, combo USB 2/Firewire card, and a 10/100 ethernet card you can bring it right up to spec (at the cost of using all 3 of your PCI slots) and since it happily uses PC100/PC133 DIMMs (PC66 will work too, if you don't change the bus timing) you can upgrade it to 768Megs of RAM for dirt. Not that I've done any of this more than half a dozen times or anything.

Almost forgot: They also have ATA controllers on the board, so you can put huge drives in them.. but you'll need to partition them for OS X. X has to be in the first 8Gig on the beige machines. Also, with a Radeon card you can replace the internal CD-ROM with a DVD ... or replace it with a CD/RW. The LiteOn drives, as well as most Sony's and Mitsumi's fit the bezel of the beige machines.

 

[jefhatfield]

man, you guys have a lot of great suggestions

thanks for all the tips...i am thinking either buy this still good machine or save up for another ibook (but that will cost more, of course)

it will be interesting to see what apple has for modest home user like me come the end of summer...if the offerings are tiny speed bumps and i have to part with 1500, i may just spring for this old beige desktop

judging from my signature, it may very well be the best machine in my collection, if i do those upgrades

 

[MacAztec]

Wait

I think you should wait. You would MOST LIKELY be more happy waiting a few months, but getting a brand new iBook which would be faster (and more expensive) than the beige box.

It would also be less trouble.