my girlfriends old pc is limping along on its last legs and i'm thinking of buying her an older imac off of ebay or craigslist. she'll be using it just for safari, itunes, and word processing. what i'm wondering is if she can get by on a G3 model (running tiger) or should i step it up and buy a G4?
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used imac: G4 or G3
- Thread starter DarthTreydor
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Go for the G4. It will seem blazingly fast compared to the G3 and would be perfectly suitable for her needs. The G3 might seem to lag a bit.
I have an iMac g3, see specs below. It runs jaguar amazing but on video playback it sometimes drops frames. I think she'll be fine with ANY G4 emac/imac.
Agreed; get an 800Mhz 15inch with a good bit of RAM... you won't be spending a whole bunch and it will be a great deal faster than the G3.
Gotta go G4! Still a beautiful machine, far more so in my mind than even the newest iMac's. I keep a "fast" 600Mhz iMac G3 at my mom's place for all the same uses you mentioned, and I used it for a couple of hours today. It works acceptably well, but it's got real issues playing-back video. The G4 not so much. Plus, when you're used to a razor-sharp flat-panel display -- a 15" CRT is a continuous disappointment.
Yeah, get the G4, even if it's 5x as much $$$. It's worth it in the long run.
Yeah, get the G4, even if it's 5x as much $$$. It's worth it in the long run.
thanks for the advice, guys. I guess I'll go for the g4. They seem to be going for about $250 on ebay, which won't break the bank too bad. Plus I have to say that the g4's are the best looking iMacs IMHO.
Keep an eye on CL. You can get G3 imacs for $20-50. If it is above 333mHz then it may be worth the little amount of cash for what she needs it for (we have a 333 in the office for the interns and it works just fine for database, wordprocessing, internet, and itunes). You'll want to make sure it has at least 512mb of RAM (Igb is preferable), and I suggest Panther over Tiger, as Panther has all the speed upgrades from Jaguar with less resource drains than Tiger. You'll probably also want to swap out the hard drive, as it is probably a 5400rpm drive. Swap it out with any 7200rpm IDE drive under 120gb (that is the ceiling for the later models; the earlier have a boot drive ceiling of 8gb, but you can create partitions to solve that in larger drives, and you should probably avoid earlier models anyway).
The easiest way to tell G3 imacs apart is the optical drive; if it is tray-loading, then pass it by. If it is slot-loading and at least 333mHz, go for it!
The easiest way to tell G3 imacs apart is the optical drive; if it is tray-loading, then pass it by. If it is slot-loading and at least 333mHz, go for it!
