Speed up boot / responsiveness on mac g3

[mrbill0]

Greetings. I have picked up a mac g3 laptop. 10Gb hard drive, 256MB memory, mac os 9 install.

I was never really able to afford one of these machines when i was in school, ive been looking to use it to take notes and other basic tasks. It has softwindows 95 on it, which has been quite helpful as well.

Im not looking to run 10four fox or anything demanding. period. minimal text like applications.

The machine is creeping slow to boot. Once its booted, its a little more responsive, but still quite slow. I was curious if there was a way to get an ssd installed or some software tricks to speed up performance.

I do not have an airport card installed, i was curious if i get one if I would be able to connect to wpa2 encrypted networks.

Any input or advice on what can be done to speed up boot time or system responsiveness is much appreciated.

 

[B S Magnet]

Greetings. I have picked up a mac g3 laptop. 10Gb hard drive, 256MB memory, mac os 9 install.

I was never really able to afford one of these machines when i was in school, ive been looking to use it to take notes and other basic tasks. It has softwindows 95 on it, which has been quite helpful as well.

Im not looking to run 10four fox or anything demanding. period. minimal text like applications.

The machine is creeping slow to boot. Once its booted, its a little more responsive, but still quite slow. I was curious if there was a way to get an ssd installed or some software tricks to speed up performance.

I do not have an airport card installed, i was curious if i get one if I would be able to connect to wpa2 encrypted networks.

Any input or advice on what can be done to speed up boot time or system responsiveness is much appreciated.

Yes, there is:

1. Your HDD is old and slow as heck. Replace the HDD with an SSD (usually these days an mSATA-to-IDE or m.2-to-IDE adapter is involved), up to 128GB. This is relatively inexpensive to do now and it will speed up your boot-up and use-response time (i.e., when launching an app).
   
2. Max out your RAM, per what Everymac notes for your particular model.
   
3. AirPort for an iBook G3/PowerBook G3 will, at most, connect to WPA (TKIP) (not WPA2 (AES)) only if the AirPort Card is the 128-bit version (found in the later models before AirPort Extreme premiered) and your OS is at 10.4.11. For WPA2, and disputably a marginally quicker wifi response/throughput (due to 802.11n MCS transmission algorithms), you will need a USB nano adapter from Edimax with the EW-7811Un chipset (you can find the correct driver/utility at the end of the first post on this wiki list).
4. Update everything to 10.4.11 (or, try for a completely fresh install of 10.4 and update to 10.4.11).
5. Use Monolingual 1.3.9 to strip out any Intel/AMD code in Universal binaries.
6. If you happen to have an older G3 ’book with ATI Rage Mobility 128, have a look here for performance tweaks (yes, even for Tiger).
7. You may still have/install OS9 separately as a dual-boot (with "install OS 9 drivers" options checked on a fresh drive) or as an emulation within OS X, but you will still need 10.4.11 to take advantage of things like the 128-bit WPA wifi capability and optimized video drivers, if #6 is applicable to your specific machine.

 

[bobesch]

Greetings. I have picked up a mac g3 laptop. 10Gb hard drive, 256MB memory, mac os 9 install.

Congrats!
Can you tell a bit more about model, processor-clockspeed and RAM?
@B S Magnet has already revealed the basic hard&software-tricks to speed things up a lot.
256MB RAM are good for os9 but a hassle for Windows-emulation or OS X...

You can find more Infos about G3 machines at The G3-Workstation Wiki thread.
My favorite standard installation routine for os9 (#6) makes a G3 a venerable network-client.
Links to wireless-solutions are here (#14).
A G3/os9 may connect to OSX Leopard and previous versions via AFP and a G3/Tiger may connect to the latest OSX/macOS versions via SMB, but I couldn't find a way to connect my os9-machines to post-Leopard-OSX.
iOS can connect to os9/AFP via iFiles v1.
ScreenSharing via VNC is possible with a OSX, Linux and Windows.

I use Connectix VirtualPC3/4 for Windows98 or Windows2000 emulation on my os9 machines.
You may find most of the stuff in the garden ...
Virtual Win2k/RDP-Client v5 give the opportunity of Remote-Desktop-sessions with other Windows-machines, but Win8/WinServer2008 need RDP-Cliend v.6, which needs at least WindowsXP-Fundamentals(SP2) and G4-hardware with higher clockspeed and a lot more RAM.

For an os9 installation from the scratch my basic tools for the start are "Stuffit Expander" (comes with os9), "Classilla" (for downloads and IMAP-mail), "Toast 4 or 5" (to mount iso-archives etc), "Transmit" (for FTP) and "Goliath"(webDAV). After them installed, the os9 machine is pretty "autonomous" and may deal with stuff from archives like the garden without any help from more advanced machines or may use VNC/FTP/webDAV/IMAP-mail for further assistance.