Power Mac g3 questions.

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hi i'm new here so please bear with me. i got my first powerbook a year ago and love it! anyways i just received a power mac g3 from a friend of a friend for free. i figured it would be nice to have another mac just for surfing. what i received was only the tower, no keyboard, mouse, or monitor. also the memory has been removed and two cards from the back have also been removed.

my questions are what do i need to get this machine up and running strictly for surfing?? what kind of monitor do i use?? how do i find out what i need? there is a sticker on the back that says: 400mhz/1mb cache/128mb sdram/6gb hd/dvd/zip rage 128 16mb/ultra scsi card/10-100t keyboard

i'm not exactly sure what all of that means or if it helps. can you guys please tell what i need to get this machine going. and i realize its an old machine and a spare computer so i dont really want to put a bunch of money into this. any help is greatly appreciated. thanks in advance.
 
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hi i'm new here so please bear with me. i got my first powerbook a year ago and love it! anyways i just received a power mac g3 from a friend of a friend for free. i figured it would be nice to have another mac just for surfing. what i received was only the tower, no keyboard, mouse, or monitor. also the memory has been removed and two cards from the back have also been removed.

my questions are what do i need to get this machine up and running strictly for surfing?? what kind of monitor do i use?? how do i find out what i need? there is a sticker on the back that says: 400mhz/1mb cache/128mb sdram/6gb hd/dvd/zip rage 128 16mb/ultra scsi card/10-100t keyboard

i'm not exactly sure what all of that means or if it helps. can you guys please tell what i need to get this machine going. and i realize its an old machine and a spare computer so i dont really want to put a bunch of money into this. any help is greatly appreciated. thanks in advance.

When you say the memory has been removed, do you mean all the memory - or is the default 128MB still there? Sounds like you've been left with a shell really. Also, does it still have the graphics card?

To use this machine STRICTLY has a surfing machine, assuming you don't surf sites using Flash-8, 30fps 1600*1200 animations, you'll need the following.

You could install almost any version of Mac OS, but I'd recommend Panther as it's just about the best for lower end machines. Earlier versions are too slow, Tiger is a bit resource hungry.

- Install at least 512MB of RAM or as much as you can afford
- You'll need to grab a ps/2 keyboard and mouse of ebay - should cost you a fe bucks at the most
- Get a CRT monitor, the best you can afford, but a 17" .22 dot pitch monitor from a decent manufacturer should be next to nothing these days
- Get Panther from eBay... should cost next to nothing
 
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thanks for the info. this might sound dumb but where does the monitor plug in? i'm used to pcs that have a multi pin port and there is nothing like that on the back of the power mac. thanks.
 
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the four slots for memory are all empty, and the four card slots are all empty. do i need to find a graphics card? thanks.
 
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the four slots for memory are all empty, and the four card slots are all empty. do i need to find a graphics card? thanks.

That's why you see no output pins, you need a gfx card. Do you have an AGP slot? If so, there is a great choice of cards on ebay, something like a Geforce 4 440mx would be fine, or a Radeon 7500 or 8500.

As for memory, 2x256MB should be fairly inexpensive.
 
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what is the agp slot? there are 4 slots. one of them is shorter than the other 3. thanks for the help!
 

dtravis7


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Is that machine Blue and White or Grey(Graphite)? Once I know that I can better help.

\
 
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The odd slot was the graphics card. It took a specific, ATI Raage 128 double-speed-PCI graphics card. You might could find one on eBay, but you'd need that specific one.

Other than that, you could try any Mac-compatible PCI graphics card.

Basically, make sure it has the important parts from the excellent labeled picture on this page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3_(Blue_&_White)

Then you'll have to make sure it has an operating system installed...get a USB mouse and keyboard....etc.
 
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The B&W G3 takes PC100/133 SDRAM. If you want to run OS X, I would recommend at least 512MB. The max for the B&W G3 is 1GB, using 4X 256MB modules.

You may want to upgrade your hard drive as well. If you have a SCSI card, it may have a SCSI hard drive. Are there any cards installed in the expansion slots at all? If not, then you may just have to use an IDE hard drive connected to the motherboard using the on-board controller. If you do have a SCSI PCI card installed, check and see if you can get the model number. You may have the capability of upgrading to a nice, affordable 15k RPM SCSI drive. If there's no SCSI card installed, you can just use a good 7200RPM IDE drive. Remember the on-board IDE on the B&W G3 won't recognize anything over ~120GB. e.g. if you install a 160GB drive, it will only show up as ~120GB.

For video card I would recommend going with an original ATi Rage 128 PCI card from a B&W G3. Theoretically you can use any Mac-edition PCI video card. The B&W G3 has no AGP slot.
 

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