blue and white or grey and white

S

supenguin

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Well, its seems my switch has went a little TOO well. Back in Feb I bought a 900 mhz G3 ibook when Microcenter was offloading them at a great price. Anyway, things went pretty good until my wife starting using it. Now whenever she wants to surf the web from the couch or something, guess what happens? Yep, she grabs the ibook and I don't have access to it for a couple hours or so. Wouldn't be a problem except all my files are on there!

Sorry for the rambling, but there is a point to all this... I think things would go a little smoother around here if we each had our own Mac. I've been trying to cut back on how much I spend on computer stuff, so I was thinking of selling some of the odds and ends I have around here and two of my three PCs. I'm guessing this will get my between $200 and $500. This puts me in the range to get a blue and white G3 tower and do some upgrading or grey and white G4 tower. Probably still some upgrading involved, but what the hey.

Two questions here: how big of a hard drive can both these systems handle? I have a 120 GB and would like to put it in the Mac and have it doing double duty as a file server.

Also, I was wondering speed-wise, what speed of a system should I look for. Here's what I'll be using the system for:

chat, surfing the web, email, watching DVD's, itunes, and some occasional gaming. Also, it must be able to run Panther and hopefully Tiger too.
 
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Matt

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The G3 towers can not run higher than OS 10.2.8, I think, don't take my advice seriously, correct me if i'm wrong people. Unless you upgrade the processor, I don't think a G3 tower would be very good for playing the latest games.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
PowerMac G5 Dual 2GHz (June 2004), 2.5GB, Airport, black 5G iPod 30GB, white MacBook 2.0 2GB
The BLue&White G3 can run Panther, but not the beige G3, although I've read about people that managed to do that after some tweaking.
Anyway, I would suggest you try to get a G4. I've installed Panther on an AGP G4 (Sawtooth) 450MHz with 768MB of RAM, and it works pretty smooth.
I don't really see though which model you mean by "grey and white G4"?!
And for games, well, we all know Macs are no good gaming machines, especially not the older ones. That's why I have the Xbox, because it is great for gaming, even with the M$ logo on it. I guess my G4 1.25GHz could handle most of the actual games, but honestly, that's not what I bought it for... :rolleyes:
 
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supenguin

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G3 desktop vs G4 desktop

Matt,
I've got a friend who bought a blue and white G3 desktop and has Panther installed on it and he says it runs pretty good. He's also got a beige G3 and those aren't officially supported by Panther. There's supposed to be a way to get it working, but it takes some major tweaking I've heard.


Avalon,
By grey and white, I guess I meant Sawtooth. Something like this:

http://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/stats/powermac_g4_450.html

Gaming really isn't a big deal as I have a PS2 I'm pretty happy with. It would be a nice extra. Same with DVD playback since both the ibook and PS2 do that well.

Any word on what systems Tiger will support? I'm thinking maybe I should go with the G4 if I can. More likely to be supported, and it will run better.
 
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Well, that's a Sawtooth, which has light grey sidepanels and a sort of dark blue front panel :)
I'm pretty sure that Tiger will support all kinds of G4 models, except maybe the very first ones with PCI graphics (called Yikes!).
An AGP G4 is a pretty good deal I guess, as long as you provide enough RAM it'll run Panther smoothly. I've had some good experiences with a 450MHz G4 with 768MB.
It will definitely run better than a G3, und chances are good that Tiger will support it.
 
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supenguin said:
Avalon,
By grey and white, I guess I meant Sawtooth. Something like this:

http://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/stats/powermac_g4_450.html

Gaming really isn't a big deal as I have a PS2 I'm pretty happy with. It would be a nice extra. Same with DVD playback since both the ibook and PS2 do that well.

Any word on what systems Tiger will support? I'm thinking maybe I should go with the G4 if I can. More likely to be supported, and it will run better.

Matt,

The G4s are the way to go if you want performance or upgradability in the long term. However, you can find b&w's dirt cheap on ebay if you look carefully. I just got one for less than $150 to use as a low-end server. The B&Ws have upgradeable processors (up to ~800MHz G4 or 1.1GHz G3). As mentioned earlier in the thread it is questionable whether or not Tiger will support these puppys. They are the oldest models officially supported by Panther. The G4s with AGP graphics are great machines and they really upgradeable most of them will take up to dual 1.2 GHz upgrades or single 1.4GHz upgrades as well as high-end graphics cards. They are not that expensive compared to new computers, but not nearly as cheap as B&W's

Hope that helps your decision.
John
 

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