Buying a used Power Mac G4 from craigslist

I found a listing for a G4 Power Mac here it is:

Howdy there,

I gots me one of these clunker Mac G4s that's taking up too much space in my studio for a gadget I don't ever use. It was purchased in 2002 and has Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash...mac os 10.2.1

It's lacking a monitor and a mouse, but it does come with a keyboard. Some books on Dreamweaver and Flash.

Apple Power Macintosh G4/400 (Gigabit Ethernet)

400 MHz PowerPC 7400 (G4) processor with the AltiVec "Velocity Engine" vector processing unit and 1 MB of backside cache

768 MB of RAM, two hard drives (a 28 GB and a 9 GB)

Photoshop

Flash

Dreamweaver

Just come and pick this thing up!

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They wanted 100 but I think I talked them down to 80. Does anyone think it's a good deal?

$80 is probably cheaper than all of the resellers when you factor in shipping costs. They didn't make 400 MHz models in 2002 so this is not the original owner. It's probably a decent deal with 768 MB and a couple hard drives.

80$ is really cheap but don't expect too much with those specs

tiger on g4

How well would Tiger run on a 400 mhz G4 processor with 768 of ram? 400 is really low, but wold the ram counteract it?

If you're doing one, maybe two things at a time, it'll be smooth for the most part. It's once you start getting into heavier multi-tasking that it starts to lagg.

I had 512mb in my old G4 400mhz Sawtooth when I had it running tiger. If I had say, Safari/Firefox and MSN messenger open, it'd perform relatively snappy.

If I tossed iTunes in there, it'd choke here and there, but was still usable

Doing all of this and then throwing say, iPhoto in there at the same time, and it started to choke a lot

The ram will help, but in all honestly, having a newer/faster Mac would be more beneficial, especially if you'll be multi-tasking a lot.

Ok. Thanks! I don't plan on using it as an everyday computer. Just the occasional iMovie, or Photoshop. My G3 iMac works ok, but I am looking for a little more power.

Believe it or not, when I had my Sawtooth, it ran Photoshop CS2 fairly nicely if you were only working on a single image at a time, or doing basic touch-ups. Anything with multiple layers/filters killed it.

Then my G4 died and it was a sad day

But yeah, as a once-in-a-while kinda thing, it'll be fine.

ok. Thanks again for all of your help!

oh and price wise, do you think around 90 would be too much for a machine of these specs?

I personally wouldn't spend any more than $50 on a G4 Powermac of similar specs.

I found one for 40 but there is about 30 dollars for shipping.

Thinking about buying a g4 powermac

I found a 500 mhz dual processor with 1 gig of ram. Do you think this is a good deal at about 100 with shipping?

iPod Nano said:

$100 US? No. Not a good idea. I would never take anything under $1000. Even that's a low price for an Apple desktop machine.

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That's a nearly 10 year old machine. I don't know about $100, but it's not out of the ballpark either.

$100 US? No. Not a good idea. I would never take anything under $1000. Even that's a low price for an Apple desktop machine.

Do you really want to pay $80 for a machine that you can only upgrade to Tiger? You only have 37GB of space, which after actually calculating the available disk space, means you will only have 26.08 + 8.38 = 34.46GB of free space (unless 28GB and 9GB are the actual size after compensating for the actual calculations). Even though you can run Tiger on it, it's going to crawl doing anything beyond light web browsing. Flash? Forget it. My guess is also that Flash, Photoshop and Dreamweaver are all old versions, especially if they are running under 10.2 with those specs.

Bottom line: unless you plan to install a lightweight OS that isn't OSX on that machine, I would highly recommend you reconsider.

NOTE: Merged similar crossposts into one coherent thread

vansmith said:

Do you really want to pay $80 for a machine that you can only upgrade to Tiger? You only have 37GB of space, which after actually calculating the available disk space, means you will only have 26.08 + 8.38 = 34.46GB of free space (unless 28GB and 9GB are the actual size after compensating for the actual calculations). Even though you can run Tiger on it, it's going to crawl doing anything beyond light web browsing. Flash? Forget it. My guess is also that Flash, Photoshop and Dreamweaver are all old versions, especially if they are running under 10.2 with those specs.

Bottom line: unless you plan to install a lightweight OS that isn't OSX on that machine, I would highly recommend you reconsider.

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I plan on using an external drive, anyway so space isn't an issue. I dont plan on using it everyday. just occasionally.

chasee178 said:

I plan on using an external drive, anyway so space isn't an issue. I dont plan on using it everyday. just occasionally.

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Even then, you will be using really outdated software. You would be using an antiquated operating system (unless you upgrade) with outdated software where skills learned there may be of little use to current versions now.

I'm not trying to say that all will be bad. I'm just not sure it's worth more than $50 (and this is being generous in my books). I had a 450 G4 once (got it for free from an IT dept deathly afraid of Macs so it wasn't hard into talking them into giving me one) and if I hadn't gotten it under the conditions I did, I probably would have walked away.

What do you plan on using it for?

vansmith said:

Even then, you will be using really outdated software. You would be using an antiquated operating system (unless you upgrade) with outdated software where skills learned there may be of little use to current versions now.

I'm not trying to say that all will be bad. I'm just not sure it's worth more than $50 (and this is being generous in my books). I had a 450 G4 once (got it for free from an IT dept deathly afraid of Macs so it wasn't hard into talking them into giving me one) and if I hadn't gotten it under the conditions I did, I probably would have walked away.

What do you plan on using it for?

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I was planning on using it mainly for iMovie and Photoshop. I decided to get an eMac instead. An all in one fits my needs better, and it had better specs.