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Can a G3 Mac Be Used As a Daily Driver in 2014

  • Yes!

    Votes: 37 62.7%
  • No!

    Votes: 22 37.3%

  • Total voters
    59
So far all is well. I am typing this from TenFourFox G3. It is actually running great, but if you wanted this to be a daily driver I would definitely say upgrade to a 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM hard drive. But so far, aside from YouTube, I haven't found anything I can't do on this machine... Only time will tell though!
 
I had mine with a 120GB hard drive in, and the max ram, which i think was around 700Mb?

It Ran Panther fantastic, and ran Tiger pretty well too.
 
So far so good. Just actually got a great Goodwill find! A PowerBook G4 in decent shape. Expect a thread on it later tonight.
 
I could use a G3 powered machine for a month or so I think (maybe longer if needed). Lord knows i've got enough of them. The biggest challenge for using a white iBook G3 is the terrible smell they emit from the keyboard! lol
 
Awesome

I have mad respect with anyone getting by with a G3 ibook today. Good Luck. Anytime I go below 1 ghz , PowerPC or Intel, I want to claw my eyes out. I tried pupngo ( a uber small puppy linux derivative) on a 160mhz Compaq Armada with 64 MB of RAM last year. It was fun for about 24hrs.

I am not Intell, but if memory serves me a G4 is just a G3 with altivec, so for anything outside of video a higher clocked G3 will usually outperform a lower clocked G4. I prepare to stand corrected.

As already mentioned, SeamonkeyPPC is 10.5 only. But it supports some scripting (with Scriptish). And don't forget about iCab 4.9. If you could link tenfourkits webkit with iCab (there was a post on that sometime back) you'd be fairly current. Please post about your Mactubes experience. When I last owned a G3 ibook I found it was better to use flash at 240p inside Camino than Mactubes, even with Quicktime set as the player.
 
I have mad respect with anyone getting by with a G3 ibook today. Good Luck. Anytime I go below 1 ghz , PowerPC or Intel, I want to claw my eyes out. I tried pupngo ( a uber small puppy linux derivative) on a 160mhz Compaq Armada with 64 MB of RAM last year. It was fun for about 24hrs.

I am not Intell, but if memory serves me a G4 is just a G3 with altivec, so for anything outside of video a higher clocked G3 will usually outperform a lower clocked G4. I prepare to stand corrected.

As already mentioned, SeamonkeyPPC is 10.5 only. But it supports some scripting (with Scriptish). And don't forget about iCab 4.9. If you could link tenfourkits webkit with iCab (there was a post on that sometime back) you'd be fairly current. Please post about your Mactubes experience. When I last owned a G3 ibook I found it was better to use flash at 240p inside Camino than Mactubes, even with Quicktime set as the player.

I'm not Intell either, but looking at Geekbench may help. Either way, the science doesn't matter! There is no denying that a G4 is far more usable in 2014 than a G3.
 
For the most part, G3's and G4's are very similar. Beyond the obvious AltiVec engine, G4's have a few more instruction sets, L3 cache support (in some revisions), non-synchronous caches to easily allow dual CPU systems, a slightly shorter pipeline, and better cache to CPU bus speeds. In most contemporary tests a 400Mhz G4 will out perform a 700Mhz G3 when not using AltiVec. When using AltiVec, the difference is much more pronounced, but not as noticeable when comparing an Intell Netburst CPU to a Core design.
 
I doubt it would be useful for internet, but it is probably good for what it was used for back then:

-Games of that era
-music and video (dvd player?)
-All office work (microsoft office)
-coding
-probably can do photo-editing
-emails


George R.R. Martin said he still uses DOS application WordPerfect to write his novels. Although I am not sure what format he exports it to the publisher
 
I just fully restored an old Pismo Powerbook. It has a 500mhz G3, 1gb ram, a new battery, new pram battery and brand new LCD backlight so its like brand new and it works great with 10.4.11. Typing this post on it now. Love these old powerbooks.
 
My dad has thrown away so many G3's. I still dont see a use for them when you have a more modern computer?
 
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I have mad respect with anyone getting by with a G3 ibook today. Good Luck. Anytime I go below 1 ghz , PowerPC or Intel, I want to claw my eyes out. I tried pupngo ( a uber small puppy linux derivative) on a 160mhz Compaq Armada with 64 MB of RAM last year. It was fun for about 24hrs.

I am not Intell, but if memory serves me a G4 is just a G3 with altivec, so for anything outside of video a higher clocked G3 will usually outperform a lower clocked G4. I prepare to stand corrected.

As already mentioned, SeamonkeyPPC is 10.5 only. But it supports some scripting (with Scriptish). And don't forget about iCab 4.9. If you could link tenfourkits webkit with iCab (there was a post on that sometime back) you'd be fairly current. Please post about your Mactubes experience. When I last owned a G3 ibook I found it was better to use flash at 240p inside Camino than Mactubes, even with Quicktime set as the player.

I usually set my PowerBook's CPU to 749 MHz and leave it there. I never noticed much of a difference between that and 1499 MHz. All the software that bogs down the CPU at 749 does it at 1499 too, so I take the better battery life and deal with the slightly worse performance. When I'm web browsing, I'll set it to the max speed if I'm using Firefox because it's such a pig, but it's not necessary with Dillo.
 
My dad has thrown away so many G3's. I still dont see a use for them when you have a more modern computer?
Well, if that was the only Mac you could use, you could probably come up with a use for it!

I'm not an iBook fan, but I'm also not into throwing away computers because I don't have a "use" for them or because I think they are "useless".

I had an iBook G3 for a couple of years before I traded it. I had PowerBooks at the time so it was used as my daughter's system for awhile and before I traded it, it was also my Time Machine backup server. I had two PowerBooks backing up to external USB drives connected to it. That was a "use" it handled pretty well.
 
Well, if that was the only Mac you could use, you could probably come up with a use for it!

I'm not an iBook fan, but I'm also not into throwing away computers because I don't have a "use" for them or because I think they are "useless".

I'm sorry, WHAT DID YOU SAY?
 
I'm sorry, WHAT DID YOU SAY?
LOL!

Sorry, but I've always preferred the PowerBook over the iBook. I'll admit that my daughter has a nice iBook now, but they are just too small for my tastes. Even when I was using my Titanium I was wishing it was larger. That's one of the reasons I like my 17's.
 
I usually set my PowerBook's CPU to 749 MHz and leave it there. I never noticed much of a difference between that and 1499 MHz. All the software that bogs down the CPU at 749 does it at 1499 too, so I take the better battery life and deal with the slightly worse performance. When I'm web browsing, I'll set it to the max speed if I'm using Firefox because it's such a pig, but it's not necessary with Dillo.

Good points, I will clock down my CPU and see if I notice any difference.

I like Dillo 3.0.4 more and more everyday. It doesn't do everything, but what it does do, it does very, very well. Wish it had a PowerPC Mac OS X port.
 
Well, if that was the only Mac you could use, you could probably come up with a use for it!

I'm not an iBook fan, but I'm also not into throwing away computers because I don't have a "use" for them or because I think they are "useless".

I had an iBook G3 for a couple of years before I traded it. I had PowerBooks at the time so it was used as my daughter's system for awhile and before I traded it, it was also my Time Machine backup server. I had two PowerBooks backing up to external USB drives connected to it. That was a "use" it handled pretty well.

Me neither, but it was my dad :D. And when i think about it we have never had iBook G3's, just other G3 computers like iMac G3, didn't read the title and i thought it was about G3 computers in general, my bad.
 
I like Dillo 3.0.4 more and more everyday. It doesn't do everything, but what it does do, it does very, very well. Wish it had a PowerPC Mac OS X port.

It seems like it might be possible. FLTK, the main dependency for Dillo is in MacPorts and, purportedly, builds to a Cocoa/Aqua version. So, it might be possible to install MacPorts and FLTK then build Dillo using it. (Don;t install MacPort's Dillo, it's horribly ancient).

Update: It does build once you work once you get it to link with Apple's iconv library. You have to run it from the command line, but it is X native. The bad news is that it doesn't see to be particularly stable.
 
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I just fully restored an old Pismo Powerbook. It has a 500mhz G3, 1gb ram, a new battery, new pram battery and brand new LCD backlight so its like brand new and it works great with 10.4.11. Typing this post on it now. Love these old powerbooks.

How much did it cost you to fully restore it? I always wanted a clamshell ibook and was wondering how much it will cost me to restore it into brand new form
 
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