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Will I regret this purchase?

J

jwakley78

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 21, 2003
3
0
Hi

I'm looking at making the switch over to the Mac. However, I want to buy an affordable machine that's still going be able to run OS X at an acceptable speed. I've found a pretty good deal on a G3 600 mhz. If I maxed out the RAM .. would this machine run OS X ok are would I be throwing away my money? I don't need large amounts of computing power, I'm going to use the computer for work processing, spreadhsheets internet use ... pretty much the basics. However, I don't want it to run extremely slow. Let me know what you think.
 
What kind of video card does it have? It should run OS X pretty well for simple day-to-day stuff and if it has a video card that can do Quartz Extreme, then it'd definitely work fine for you, especially once Panther is released, which should improve speed on even slower systems by a good factor.
 
Re: Will I regret this purchase?

Originally posted by jwakley78
Hi

I'm looking at making the switch over to the Mac. However, I want to buy an affordable machine that's still going be able to run OS X at an acceptable speed. I've found a pretty good deal on a G3 600 mhz. If I maxed out the RAM .. would this machine run OS X ok are would I be throwing away my money? I don't need large amounts of computing power, I'm going to use the computer for work processing, spreadhsheets internet use ... pretty much the basics. However, I don't want it to run extremely slow. Let me know what you think.
Click to expand...

How much is it? You can get a pretty good deal on a refurbished emac on apples website. Plus it has a better screen an a g4


BTW this is my 999post;)
 
I would look at the eMac. I have a 400/g3 iMac. It runs OS X fine with 640megs of ram. It was fine with just 256megs as well. The only thing bad about running a G3 iMac with OS X is that the software that comes with it will probably be OS 9 and OS 9 apps. You will have to spend a lot of money to update all of the software to OS X software. The bundled software is worth a large sum of cash. I think you can find good deals on refurbished eMacs with larger screens, G4 processor, better graphics, and OS X bundled software.

Here is one for you. http://www.smalldog.com/product/41902
 
Originally posted by Coca-Cola
I would look at the eMac. I have a 400/g3 iMac. It runs OS X fine with 640megs of ram. It was fine with just 256megs as well. The only thing bad about running a G3 iMac with OS X is that the software that comes with it will probably be OS 9 and OS 9 apps. You will have to spend a lot of money to update all of the software to OS X software. The bundled software is worth a large sum of cash. I think you can find good deals on refurbished eMacs with larger screens, G4 processor, better graphics, and OS X bundled software.

Here is one for you. http://www.smalldog.com/product/41902
Click to expand...

Tell me about it...after I bought my 15" PowerBook last week I realized "Oh crap...I have no OS X software" so I just broke my bank account replacing my OS 9 software with OS X equivelents. I don't have everything yet, but I need to wait until I get a new job before I get anything else. I swear, the software ends up costing so much more than the initial hardware purchase.
 
What kind of 600 Mhz G3 are you talking about an ibook or maybe? I did't think apple made a G3 tower with a processor faster than 400 Mhz but I could be wrong.
 
this imac g3 400dv with 320 ram and a 8 meg ati card runs jag fine, a few spinning beach balls from time to time and the window resizing is somewhat jerky.
However I'd go for the emac if your budget will stretch, depends upon the deal you are getting and how much you are willing to spend.
 
A G3 400Mhz or higher or any G4 processor will do fine with Jaguar. Ram does help, at the least you should have 256MB installed, but more is better.
 
As far as running OS X on an older machine, my buddy is running it on a 333Mhz Wallstreet PBook and while it's not nearly as snappy as a new machine running OS X, it does function reasonably and he is more than satified with not having to buy a new laptop.
 
It depends on how long you want to keep the machine and keep current software on it. If you want a machine that's going to be good for 3 years, that's not it.

I believe that's an iBook with the 100 MHz bus and 8MB of VRAM, which is a good machine but not all that technologically advanced. Filled with RAM, it would be a better than acceptable Mac OS X machine, though, especially with 10.3.
 
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