G4 B&W thoughts

[pcamen]

As I go through all my stuff to figure out what to get rid of, I started playing around with a G4 B&W 450.  It needs a DVD-RW drive and an HD, but is in otherwise good working condition. 

I'm a little torn on this one.  On the plus side, I'm really impressed with the case design and how easy it is to work on.  The box has two video cards capable of pretty good resolution (1600x1200), has a serial card, 1GB of ram, which is nice for a System 9 machine, and feels pretty snappy.    It's got a zip and built in ethernet.  It seems like this would make a pretty good all-around System 9 machine as long as I had a nice place to tuck it under a desk. 

On the minus side, for a System 9 machine, I have a number of Mac Minis that are much faster and take up almost no room and can do 1600x1200 resolution.

Anyone have any thoughts on the B&W that might sway me one way or the other?

 

[Unknown_K]

There are tons of good OS 9 era machines out there with the B&W G3 being one of them. 

I modded a normal G3 B&W to a G4 because I needed a G4 at the time for my RTMAC setup, and that is still what is in it. Since then I snagged a few Sawtooths, MDD, and QS's which run OS 9 faster and are much better OSX machines. All those machines pretty much have the same easy to work on case and also AGP plus you can find some cheap (and not so cheap) processor upgrades for them. Both of my Sawtooths have been upgraded to dual 450/500 G4's for example. The downside of the MDD is their power supplies something you don't have issues with on a B&W.

And you can still use ADB on the B&W if you have an old Wacom drawing tablet or something else that uses that port (old software with ADB dongles).