I was recently given a G3 power mac. You know the blue and white one. Well I am not familiar with Mac's at all and would like to know if it's any good or should I trash it. I been told by quite a few people that they are not upgradeable.
I was recently given a G3 power mac. You know the blue and white one. Well I am not familiar with Mac's at all and would like to know if it's any good or should I trash it. I been told by quite a few people that they are not upgradeable.
IIRC they can be upgraded to a faster G3 or G4 CPU, upgrade the RAM and hard disk just like any other computer, the main limitation depending on what you want out if it, is the video card is limited to the PCI bus.
Go to Everymac to determine which one you have. The odds are it will still be running OS 9. It is a good machine for surfing and light apps. Depending on which video card you have DVD's might skip. If you are going to do upgrades, I would recommend spending $600 for a MacMini. It will be a lot faster and already have iLife 08.
If on the other hand you want to work with this machine its not a bad machine.
Why Trash it? This is the perfect oprotunity for you to experence the glory that is mac. Put a G4 in it and install leapard. Then you will see the light...
Think a decent pentium III box. It has 4 slots for standard PC100/133 memory modules, a good ATI 128 graphic card. FireWire and USB 1. Many has DVD drives. You can install 1 GB of RAM in it. OS X 10.3 that is a good candidate for opertivse system for this computer is usable at 256 MB RAM but 500 or more is better.
If you have bigger harddisks ( 10-120 GB) and RAM from a scrapped P III do install it.
Sure you can upgrade it:
1 GHz G3 CPU
ATI 9200 graphical card
SATA card
SATA disks
USB 2 card
4 x 256 MB RAM DIMMS
But then you are looking at a cost exeeding that of a new mac mini that will run circles around it.
So either
1. keep it as it is and install the game Marthon Infinity and down load all the free levels/conversions like "Evil" Mare Ceti and many others
2. Get some RAM cheaply and OS X (10.2 to 10.4 will work). A bigger HD is a good thing as it will be both faster and leave more space for applications.
I was recently given a G3 power mac. You know the blue and white one. Well I am not familiar with Mac's at all and would like to know if it's any good or should I trash it. I been told by quite a few people that they are not upgradeable.
It depends how fast it is. If it's under 500MHz, I'd trash it personally or dump it on an elderly relative (not physically dump it on them unless they have a will you can benefit from) or maybe even a kid as a first computer.
You can consider putting it one ebay - you might get $50-100 or something.
If you want to put it to any use, you can try installing Linux to experiment with it without messing up your main computer.
Comments
I was recently given a G3 power mac. You know the blue and white one. Well I am not familiar with Mac's at all and would like to know if it's any good or should I trash it. I been told by quite a few people that they are not upgradeable.
IIRC they can be upgraded to a faster G3 or G4 CPU, upgrade the RAM and hard disk just like any other computer, the main limitation depending on what you want out if it, is the video card is limited to the PCI bus.
If on the other hand you want to work with this machine its not a bad machine.
If you have bigger harddisks ( 10-120 GB) and RAM from a scrapped P III do install it.
Sure you can upgrade it:
1 GHz G3 CPU
ATI 9200 graphical card
SATA card
SATA disks
USB 2 card
4 x 256 MB RAM DIMMS
But then you are looking at a cost exeeding that of a new mac mini that will run circles around it.
So either
1. keep it as it is and install the game Marthon Infinity and down load all the free levels/conversions like "Evil" Mare Ceti and many others
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Infinity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_total_conversions
2. Get some RAM cheaply and OS X (10.2 to 10.4 will work). A bigger HD is a good thing as it will be both faster and leave more space for applications.
I was recently given a G3 power mac. You know the blue and white one. Well I am not familiar with Mac's at all and would like to know if it's any good or should I trash it. I been told by quite a few people that they are not upgradeable.
It depends how fast it is. If it's under 500MHz, I'd trash it personally or dump it on an elderly relative (not physically dump it on them unless they have a will you can benefit from) or maybe even a kid as a first computer.
You can consider putting it one ebay - you might get $50-100 or something.
If you want to put it to any use, you can try installing Linux to experiment with it without messing up your main computer.