Dont you guys upgrade

[Lt Major Burns]

ElDiabloConcaca is right. the machine is just a tool. i can draw a better picture than most people with a 12p biro, i have never felt the need to buy a £25 draughting pen. the AGP graphics G4 was, 4 years ago, the shit. seen in all the top design studios, the top design studios produced top design on it. 4 years later, the machine is better than when it was new. i have my Dual-G5 Bastard Graphics Engine purely because i happened to come into a large sum of money last year, and i thought that this would be the best way of investing it. i often think that it is actually too good for me, that i don't use it to it's full. that i could have quite easliy produced all the work i have done on it on an imac costing £1k less. i could have done it all on a £200 dell. it just would have taken longer, and be less fun. but i could have done it.

if the machine works for you, use it. never upgrade just because theres a new one. weigh up the cost.

[maz94protege]

Im thinkin of also buying a G4 Power mac for a server, dont know which OS ill be running but thinkin 9 since everyone is all praise on that OS. Powermax.com is where im buying mine from, thinkin of dual 400mhz one. Still debating which to get or just get an 800mhz ibook and call it a day.

[Lt Major Burns]

no, not many people are all praise on 9. the nostalgics love it, but that fact of the matter is that there has not been an OS as unstable as 9 in a long time. it has some perks that OSX has yet to inherit (windowshading, tabbed finder windows, platinum sounds, the old apple menu etc) but other than that, OSX is far superior.

[fryke]

The nostalgia part is very important, don't underestimate it. See: When you suddenly find a Macintosh Color Classic somewhere and fall in love with it (there's nothing else you can do, anyway), you suddenly need information on how to make use of this old machine. So you need information on System 7.1, on what software can be run on the machine, to what use you can still put it. A place to go where people *have* this information is important.

Also: Never forget that any Mac, even a 1984 Mac, can still be the perfect partner to write -the- novel of the 21st century or the screenplay to the movie that changed 'drama' forever. It can also be a very good thing to have an old computer capable of running a couple of games and productivity software if you have kids in an age where you don't want them to crash your main computer. I also guess that "The Incredible Machine" is far more educational than, say, Doom 3.

[Lt Major Burns]

i sometimes spend hours looking through the internet at old computers, old screen shots from old systems, a nostalgic curiosity. i was actually using someones old quicksilver g4, and also their 15" flat iMac g4 and the curiosity was amazing, the iMac was running panther (which i havent used in a while) but the Quicksilver was running 9.2.2! i was actually excited at using this! it had iTunes2 on it, with the old-look brushed metal, and aqua buttons at the bottom, with it's big blobby play/pause/burn etc buttons. i played with the finder tabbing windows down to the bottom, played with photoshop 7, impressed at the splash screen with transparency, as i'd forgotten os9 supported this. and then started editing my png. it was lovely, even though i was treating this 3 year old machine as nostalgia. it was lovely.

it crashed and i had to reboot. stupid old machine.

i was still nostalgic at seeing the os9 boot screen full screen though.... ¬_¬

[sinclair_tm]

as far as a dual 400 desktop vs a 800 laptop, it depends on if you are ever going to upgrade it. as they sit, the laptop will preform better, but if you want something that can be upgraded, to lets say, dual 2gig, then go for the desktop.
btw, i never remember having too much of a problem with os 9 crashing on my 7500 w/233g3 upgrade. of course, i had over 256mb ram at the time too, which was a lot for that mac. when i upgraded to a 450g4 and 512 ram, i went to 10.2 and never looked back at os 9. but there are times i want to pull my mac+ out just to play with system 6.0.5. those were the days.

[Mikuro]

Since this is in the Classic System and Software forum, I assume it's more about software than hardware. Then again, the two go hand in hand a lot of the time, as OS X has awfully steep system requirements.

I made the full-time move to OS X a couple years ago on my 450MHz iMac. The only reason I did was because Apple stopped updating Java for OS 9, and I really wanted to play Go on KGS. That's it. If not for KGS, I probably would've stuck to OS 9 for another year or two. OS X was certainly a pain to use on that system, whereas OS 9 ran like a dream.

My father still uses OS 9 on our old Power Mac 9600/300 every day. It does what he needs. He uses iCab 2.9 for web browsing; I've shown him more "modern" browsers for OS 9 (like iCab 3 and Mozilla), but he sticks with iCab because it's just more usable. (Ever try viewing "modern" sites in a "modern" browser with a large font size? Everything overlaps, and nothing is legible. Stupid designers.) If he moved to X....what would be the advantage, exactly? We could spend hundreds of dollars on a new computer capable of running OS X decently, but it just wouldn't be worth it. It would make more sense to buy a used Power Mac G4 and keep running OS 9.

Sure, there's the occasional crash in OS 9, but it's just not a big problem. 8.1, 8.6 and 9.1 were all very stable (9.2 not so much, because Apple kind of stopped caring at that point and updated it only for Classic support).

I appreciate that I can go weeks without rebooting with OS X. I appreciate that I don't need to think about memory management. And I appreciate Exposé. But none of that makes OS 9 (or OS 8 or System 7, for that matter) any less usable. OS X just hasn't changed my life.

[nixgeek]

As sinclair_tm mentioned, sometimes it takes us some time to get the new machine that we want, so we work with the older Macs that are still holding their value after so many years. I came across an old 68040 Quadra 650 that allowed me to use all of my old Mac apps for music creation for free. This is a computer that in it's time was worth around $4000 and I got it for free in working condition. I've had it for about 3 years and currently it's hosting my family homepage quite well.

Later on, I came across a PowerPC based Mac clone from Motorola which had a PPC604e processor (StarMax 4000). I ran Mac OS 9 on that along with some of the newer OS 9 apps that were available. And since it had PCI slots, I was able to install a USB card for my peripherals (and it was supported right out of the box). I also went ahead and made it dual boot with OS 9 and Debian Linux for PowerPC. Even though it was only a 160 Mhz CPU with 128 MB of SDRAM, that sucker held its own in both Mac OS 9 and Linux.

I am now the owner of a new iMac G5. How was I finally able to get this? Well, since we were blessed to have the ability to refinance on our house, I took the opportunity to make it an early birthday gift. Yes, the older Macs have taken care of my Mac addiction and now that I have this newer one, I have no need for the StarMax, but the Quadra is forever. And the great thing about the iMac is that I know it will last me for years to come (like when the iMac itself is considered "obsolete").