B&W G3, w00t!

[LSD]

Anyone on the IRC channels will know I've been carrying on about this for two days but I thought I'd post it anyway. Besides, it's taken me this long to get it running the way I want

OK, here goes. It's a:

350Mhz
256MB RAM
6.4GB HDD
Rev. B

I saw it advertised in the Sunday paper and bought it Monday afternoon for AUD$50. It's my first OSX-capable Mac and I'm loving it to bits. I've already installed Tiger on it and I eventually plan to up the RAM to 512MB, install a 40GB HDD and possibly install a DVD-ROM drive.

[MacTCP]

[LCGuy]

Very cool! For the past two months i've been loving being back on OS X, as my only OS X capable Mac, a Rev. D iMac was out of commission for almost a year due to hardware failure. But Macs of this vintage are great machines, aren't they? Like, my iMac is from 1999, same as your G3, yet it feels exactly like the sort of computer you'd go out and buy in a store tomorrow.

[LSD]

yeah, I'm actually quite surprised at how well Tiger runs on this machine. I mean, it's certainly not lightning fast and some of the more advanced desktop effects own the PCI 3D card in it but it's a lot more usable than XP SP2 on the same hardware and on a whole other planet to Vista. Makes me even more excited about getting my MacBook next week

[The Macster]

some of the more advanced desktop effects own the PCI 3D card in it

What sort of video card are using? My Beigey has a 32 MB PCI Original Radeon Mac Edition and Expose etc work great, as well as they would on a new Mac I think (though I don't want to use a new Mac in case I find that it's even better!).

[LSD]

It's some Rage 128 thing I believe. It's fine for most things but you start with some of the "heavier" desktop effects (like the 'flip around and down to the dock' effect whern you minimise a window) and you can see it's choking. I'm not too worried about it personally, I'm still in awe that a nearly 10 year old 350Mhz machine can run such a modern OS

[The Macster]

I'm still in awe that a nearly 10 year old 350Mhz machine can run such a modern OS

Same here - that's why I love my Beigey, as it's not even meant to be able to run Tiger yet it does, and would make a great main machine for someone not wanting to do really heavy-duty stuff on it. I mean, when did you last get given a 10 year old PC that could run Vista really fast? You should maybe look for a Radeon as that will improve your OS X experience even more

[LSD]

Did Radeons ever come in 66Mhz PCI flavour? I hadn't thought too much about upgrading the video card because it's such an unusual configuration. Well, maybe not for Macs but seeing as I mainly have a PC background it is to me

[The Macster]

The original (no number), 7000, and 9 series Radeons will work in the Beige G3 I think, presumably the same is true for the B&W. The original Radeon is actually said to perform better than the 7000, despite being older, so is probably your best choice as the 9 series Mac cards are expensive and said to have poor compatibility with Mac OS 9. You must get a Mac Edition card, as PC versions of the cards won't work (unless you want to get into flashing them). This does make getting one rather more difficult, as you could probably get an old PC card for free, but the Mac ones are hard to find - I had to pay £20 including shipping for mine.

The Beigey has built-in video, though it's not very compatible with Tiger and would give pretty poor performance anyway, so adding a dedicated PCI video card is crucial on a Beige G3. The B&W comes with a basic PCI video card like the Rage, as I don't think it has have built-in video, which is OK but it would still benefit from something better.

[LSD]

I'm not particularly concerned with OS9 compatibility, I have the 7300/7600 FrankenMac for that

I'm not beyond re-flashing a PC card but the question still remains: will the gains to be had from upgrading be greater than the losses taken from going from a 66Mhz card to a 33Mhz one?

This is why I'm not terribly concerned about upgrading the video. I'm trying to keep my mind entirely on what is feasible. If I could go all-out, I'd upgrade the video, CPU, optical drive, hard drive, the whole nine yards. However, a bigger hard drive, more RAM and switching in a DVD-ROM are all relatively low-cost, high availability upgrades.