Quick advice on ibook purchase!

OK, I have been looking for the past few weeks on ebay, waiting to get a good ibook. I have mainly been looking at the G3's, simply because of the price difference, however, before I commit to one, I want to make sure I am not wasting my money. I have no experience with mac's and need some advice. I plan on buying the laptop for a Xmas gift for my fiance, she would mostly be using it for surfing the web and basic office stuff.

I definetely want to be able to keep up with the newest OS for mac's.

I now have found a couple and would like your honest opinion on them. My main concern is with the slower processor, if you could tell me if I am getting to ancient with some of the slower processors(or what is the slowest you would go)?

1)
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iBook G3 900MHz. 640 MB ram. 8 months left on Apple Care. New 80GB Hitachi HD. Airport card installed. MAC OS 10.4, Tiger. 12.1" display. Combo drive. Logic board has been replaced. 64MB video ram.

2)
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ibook G3 700MHz. 640 MB ram. New 30gb HD. Airport card installed. Combo drive. OSX 10.4 installed. New battery.

Any feedback would help. Let me know if these are good laptops, or if I should maybe shoot for a G4?

It depends on what you want to pay. They're both good machines, and I am sure option #1 is much more expensive that #2.

For what it's worth, I bought my daughter a 12" 700 MHz iBook G3 with a 20 GB hard drive, CD ROM, Airport, and maxed out the memory at 640 MB. It runs Tiger and all the apps I loaded on it (MS Office, etc) perfectly.

Good luck!

Re: Update!

Well, I went ahead with choice number 1, and paid $730 for it? Does that seem like a reasonable price?

bschweit said:

Well, I went ahead with choice number 1, and paid $730 for it? Does that seem like a reasonable price?

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Sounds like an excellent deal to me. And the extra video RAM is a rare bonus indeed.

I just bought a 900MHz iBook yesterday - OS 10.2, 40GB drive, 640MB RAM, no airport card. Bout $630 (w/shipping) through a commercial reseller.

So is the 64mb of video ram a rare find?? Is that an upgrade?

radarbob said:

Sounds like an excellent deal to me. And the extra video RAM is a rare bonus indeed.

I just bought a 900MHz iBook yesterday - OS 10.2, 40GB drive, 640MB RAM, no airport card. Bout $630 (w/shipping) through a commercial reseller.

Click to expand...

There is no video RAM upgrade. As I understand this situation, the logic board replacement came with 64MB video RAM. bschweit just got very, very lucky.

Even the new iBooks come with "only" 32MB video RAM. So I have no idea how that computer ended up w/ 64MB.