Pulling the trigger on a G4 PowerMac?

[Derwood]

Howdy,

I've been offered a G4 PowerMac for £150 (spec below) and I just want a little impartial advice from the good people of the MacRumors forum.

My partner and I are both returning to postgraduate study this year. We currently have the MacBook in my sig and are looking for a cheap second hand mac that will handle Tiger reasonably well, be a suitable machine for MS Office apps, email, light web-browsing, and possibly even act as an iTunes server. What do you reckon given the spec below and are there any known issues or things to consider with this particular generation of G4 tower.

Product Family: PowerMac
Memory (RAM): 1gig
Processor Type: PowerPC G4
Hard Drive Capacity: 40 GB
Processor Speed: 500 MHz (Dual)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers, Derwood

 

[G4DP]

I'm running the exact same machine, all i've had to do in seven years is replace the hard drive.

£150 for only a 40GB hard drive, a bit much. But never had any trouble with the machine itself, runs tiger perfectly, I know it'll be a little slow with Leopard. But for all the needs you entioned, it should be fine.

 

[Derwood]

Many thanks...

...G4DP. What's the video card spec and does it support Quartz Extreme et al? Do you know the max. ram installable on this machine?

Cheers for getting back to us on this.

Regards, Derwood

 

[G4DP]

The max ram it will recognise is 1.5gig.

The video card isn't worth mentioning, ATi card - Rage128Pro. 16mb VRAM. A real power house.

Quartz Extreme isn't supported. I haven't upgraded the cars, although it is very very easy to do.

 

[velocityg4]

That video card should not be a hang up anyways. When I had my G4 with a non Quarts Extreme/ Core Image supported card I did not notice any difference. Except no nifty special affects. Everything should work perfectly.

By the way I used to run an iTunes server off of a Beige G3/300 just fine.

On a side note: only 512mb RAM in the Macbook in your sig😱 Please get more RAM, I can almost here it crying when an app is opened under rosetta😀.

 

[Derwood]

That video card should not be a hang up anyways. When I had my G4 with a non Quarts Extreme/ Core Image supported card I did not notice any difference. Except no nifty special affects. Everything should work perfectly.

By the way I used to run an iTunes server off of a Beige G3/300 just fine.

Well it's good to hear that, for what I intend to be using it for, that it'll do the job. I have to say though, I think £150 is perhaps a little steep given the price that G4 mini's show up for on eBay. I'm still toying with the idea...

On a side note: only 512mb RAM in the Macbook in your sig😱 Please get more RAM, I can almost here it crying when an app is opened under rosetta😀.

Dude...please! I'm embarassed, really I am. 😱 I have to say, they should have never shipped the Rev.A's with 512mb. Made no sense whatsoever. Top upgrade for G4/G5 machines was to up the RAM. Glad to see that 1gb is now the minimum.