Purchased PowerMac G3--Any Tips or Suggestions?

Hey everyone! So I just recently purchased a PowerMac G3 and wanted to get some tips and suggestions for the system. Obviously, I am going to upgrade the hard drive and increase the storage space. I was also looking at putting Mac OS X 10.2---any suggestions?

Here are the system specs:

Apple PowerMac G3 350 Mhz
128 MB RAM
6 GB (Will upgrade for sure)
ATI Rage 128 (16 MB VRAM)
Zip Drive
Fresh install of OS 9

Thanks for your suggestions and tips!

My G3 400MHz iMac runs Panther (10.3.9) quite well with 640mb RAM and a Seagate 80GB HDD.

It's very stable and does most basic tasks quite well like iTunes, Adium, Camino, DVD player etc. iPhoto is a little slow at rendering but for a small library it's usable too.

Remember the hard drive is limited to 120GB, I think. If you use anything larger than that it will only recognize 120GB of it. Even OSX 10.4 will run well on the G3, but you will defenitely have to upgrade the memory if you're going that route.

Ditto the extra ram. It is fairly cheap and you will want it. Make sure the System 9 is 9.2.2 with QuickTime 6.0.3. My only question is why 10.2? If you have the choice, 10.4 will behave very well on an older Mac.

youthpastor said:

Hey everyone! So I just recently purchased a PowerMac G3 and wanted to get some tips and suggestions for the system. Obviously, I am going to upgrade the hard drive and increase the storage space. I was also looking at putting Mac OS X 10.2---any suggestions?

Here are the system specs:

Apple PowerMac G3 350 Mhz
128 MB RAM
6 GB (Will upgrade for sure)
ATI Rage 128 (16 MB VRAM)
Zip Drive
Fresh install of OS 9

Thanks for your suggestions and tips!

Click to expand...

Upgrade the RAM anyway possible... and also install Panther. Panther is far more efficient than Jaguar and the machine will run faster, believe it or not. Tiger will run about the same as Jaguar speed wise, but will offer more features obviously. 10.2.x is not well supported and many apps won't work, such as iTunes 7, iBank, Moneydance, Realplayer 10 etc.

A bigger HDD will help too and perhaps a DVD drive. The machine should just about be able to play DVD movies.

Thanks for the suggestions thus far. I guess I was leaning towards Jaguar 10.2 because I was not completely sure if it could handle Tiger or not. If that is the case--then I will just pick up a copy of Tiger and put it on the system then. Thanks for the comments!