Choices for OS 9 Box

[CompactMacLover]

I have to start archiving some old data to CD/DVD. I have 2 options for my machine to do so. Most of the data is on floppy, ZIP, and Syquest EZ135

Beige G3 AIO 300mhz 128MB RAM, OS 9.1 Zip and CD and USB

Or a Beige G3 Tower with a 400mhz ZIF from a B&W G3

768MB RAM, CDRW, CD-ROM, ZIP and USB

Seems like the MT is more expandable, It has a nice ATI Graphics card in it as well. I like the AIO, But id almost like to restore that one back to stock since I mainly collect the All in one macs, and every one of my AIO macs are running the original ssw.

As far as monitors go, I have an extra 17 inch LCD laying around that works good, The AIO takes precious desk space

 

[Unknown_K]

The Beige MT is a great OS 9 machine, I run 9.2.1 on mine.

 

[CompactMacLover]

yeah thats all I plan to run on it, And an old version of Photoshop since I have a a really nice SCSI HP 11x17 Scanner sitting here. I got a B&W G3 laying around too, But i like the serial ports so I can use my imagewriter and connect my quicktake and newton and such

 

[Unknown_K]

I have a Umax 1200s connected to mine, and with an ADB KVM I can use a digitizer panel for drawing and other things. Finding 256MB DIMMs to get the Beige to the max of 768MB of RAM is easy to do.

 

[CompactMacLover]

Im looking for an ADB KVM since Id like to keep my IIci up and running. I have 768MB of ram laying here for it, just tried to mount the plexwriter and the drive opening sits a bit too high for it to open. Ill have to take apart my QueFire and use that drive, since im replacing the drive in the QueFire with a lightscribe DVDRW for my MacBook. Ive just got lots of family photos to scan in, all kinds of family documents, and the old HP 11x17 scanner I have worked great when I put it in storage years ago. Its a big beast but it gets the job done

 

[John Hokanson Jr.]

OS 9 is ridiculous with anything more than about 512MB of RAM. I have 1 gig, and I only use a fraction of that. I am thinking about moving the system folder into a RAM disk just to justify having all that RAM.

But hey... it's cheap.

 

[Unknown_K]

I just turn VM off with more then 512MB. If you have Photoshop running scanning high resolution images you can burn up a decent amount of RAM.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Classilla likes RAM.

I put a gig into my TiBook and use a fat RAM disk. However, my MDD likes 1.5GB because it's a build host for OS 9 development.

 

[Unknown_K]

Kind of funny how a MDD has the same RAM limit of a much older Powermac 9600. The Sawtooth can do 2GB so why did they drop it for later macs?

 

[beachycove]

I know this is heresy but — because a pre-Jobs machine is designed better than a post-Jobs machine.

 

[John Hokanson Jr.]

I think the MDD has a limit of 2GB, but OS 9 can only address up to 1.5GB in either case.

Which is kinda interesting. That's another thing to add to the Mac OS 9 wishlist: Support for the full 2GB of RAM.

Another interesting fact is that 9 forces VM off once you hit 1GB. While you really shouldn't need VM with that much RAM, I have heard that having it on results in a better a job of flushing memory when closing an application.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

"Flushing memory" ?

If you mean purging the heap, that's independent of VM. There are some tools that will do it on demand for you. Similarly, I'm not aware of the VM method particularly improving memory fragmentation (but if you have a lot of RAM, you can essentially ignore fragmentation since there will probably be more than enough contiguous space somewhere else in memory).

 

[CompactMacLover]

I got her up and running. 384MB RAM, 40GB Hard Drive OS 9.2.2, Quite a nice set up, I have it hooked to a 15 inch dell monitor

 

[John Hokanson Jr.]

It might be purging the heap. I gotta re-read about VM. I do use a program called "Mac OS Purge" from time to time.

Now if only somebody can do something about those goddamned Power PC Exception Errors that crop up...

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Yeah, I was specifically thinking of Mac OS Purge. Good tool.