OK well this isn't anything super exciting as my new ibook should be here tomorrow, but a neighbor near my house knows i like macs and today he just dropped off his old b&w ?266? tower and a monitor (some old grey 16" apple monitor) for free... it runs fine and it has ethernet card in it, but is there anything exciting i can do with this old relic? like turn it into a music/movie server with a big hd in it or something? any ideas are welcome!
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What to do with an old B&W....
- Thread starter zeeko
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zeeko said:
You can turn it into a movie/music server. First of all, you can add up to four hard drives (or more if you modify things a bit inside). With each hard drive hooked to a ATA 133 card (two cards and two per card), you could have four HUGE 200-300 GB hard drives filled with movies and music. Your music would likely only fill 5-60 GB of one drive. Your movies on the other hand would quickly fill the space up. Each movie file is 4-8 GB or so (for Hollyhood movies). You could get an ATI 9200 video card and hook up the card to your TV and run movies from the computer.
Honestly though, I can't imagine why doing so would be better than simply playing DVDs in a DVD player--with a remote--unless you plan to steal movies by ripping them from either rented movies or borrowed movies.
zeeko said:
I wouldn't toss it....yet. I would have both a desktop and a laptop. You may find you want a desktop around for certain things (it is far easier to do many tasks on a desktop than a laptop). For general web browsing, simple game playing (tetris, snood, etc), paper typing, iTunes listening, and what not your computer will do you just fine. What OS does it have? What size hard drive? How much ram? If it is too bare bones and you don't want to spend money to get it up to a respectable performance level, sell it on either ebay or your local paper or local trader type web site. You should be able to get at least $40-50 for it.
I've got my beige G3 in the garage. Excellent to have the internet available while I working on a car or building something or painting. Plus I can have access to my itunes on my workstation. I've also used it in the field as an intervalometer and image storage for time lapse video. It is definitely my work horse, I use it tons. Slow and steady I say to myself as I set it to a task. Plus if it gets destroyed I'm not heartbroken. I'll just pick up another. Good times.
gammamonk said:
He says it is a B & W, which if it is must be at least 300 Mhz since they never made a 266 B & W. He may have meant a beige g3 but called it the wrong thing.
