Advice on Buying a G4

[spaceman uk]

Hi

I've been using a mac for years. At work I have a beauty - a spanking new G5. At home I use a pc (yack) and an imac. The imac is one of the early tray loading ones (233mhz) with a tiny 2gig drive. Amazingly I still use this to do my freelance work at home (I'm a designer - use photoshop, illustrator, quark, dreamweaver and flash to name a few). I'm getting to notice how slow it is now, especially compared to the G5 I use at work.

I've got a load of heavy photoshop freelance work to do soon and I know my imac just won't take it, so I'm looking at getting a second hand G4, but I'm on a budget as I've just blown a load of cash on photography equipment.

Someone has offered me a G4 with this spec for £450:
G4 450mhz
2 x 80 GB hard drives
DVD Burner (a pioneer 106)
Zip 100mb
1 gb RAM
RAGE 128 gfx card
pro keyboard and pro mouse.
Dual boot - panther and os 9.2

I'd like your opinions on if you think it'd be worth it and how would I go about finding out if the processor is upgradable, as the owner wasn't sure.

Thanks!
Spaceman

 

[evopanop]

If you want a fairly cheap PowerMac G4 that's also pretty quick, I'd say go for the Dual 450MHz "Gigabit Ethernet" model. They can be had for relatively cheap, and the performance of the thing amazed me. The specs of mine are in my signature. It's surprisingly faster than my 2.0GHz Dell PC running XP. So, that would be my suggestion... Also, to find out what parts work for your computer, look here, and click on "Power Mac G4" on the Right side of the screen under the heading "View Upgrade by Computer Model." It'll then take you to a page that shows all the different Power Mac G4 models, and what kind of upgrades you want to look at.

Hope that helps!