Blue and White G3 - OSX or OS9?

drunkmac

drunkmac

has a mac beyond repair
I got ahold of a blue and white G3 tower recently. 300mhz, 6.4gb, 64mb of ram. Sucks right? Well Im putting 512mb of ram in there and a 20gb hard drive. So, until I can afford a CPU upgrade, do you think it's best to go with OS X or OS9? I have OS X on CD, OS9 I do not. I feel like OSX might be a little sluggish, soooo....?
 
Also, I need to upgrade to a dvd drive or burner. Whats a good internal and/or external (firewire 400) burner that has a good price?
 
Also, G3s don't allow booting off of firewire devices and I'm sure that includes dvd/cd drives so you'll have to go down the internal route.
 
drunkmac said:
I got ahold of a blue and white G3 tower recently. 300mhz, 6.4gb, 64mb of ram. Sucks right? Well Im putting 512mb of ram in there and a 20gb hard drive. So, until I can afford a CPU upgrade, do you think it's best to go with OS X or OS9? I have OS X on CD, OS9 I do not. I feel like OSX might be a little sluggish, soooo....?
Click to expand...

My B&W G3 has been overclocked to 400 MHz and operates 10.3 without a problem (348 MB RAM, 40 GB HD). And it is not THAT slow. You cannot use GarageBand but iTunes, Office and VLC player are fine.
 
I had a B&W G3 that I upgraded to X a while back and even though it wasn't as snappy as what I have now, it got the job done (and I even used it quiet heavily-> games, compiling, etc). It did have a problem with an external CD burner I had. Could've been the burner, but I would recomend going internal with any type of burner.
 
My G3 (as per sig) runs OS X.3 fantastically well for a machine that I got for around $250. It also runs extra quiet as I've disconnected the case fan - it's not actually got any hotter or less stable, yet, but I'm monitoring the situation....!
 
Because I paid $125 after shipping for this G3 :)

Looks like OS X will be the way to go. I might do a dual boot with OS 9 though.
 
You might want to... Just beware of going anywhere near the OS X drive partition when you're in OS 9 - file permissions are there for a reason.

And incidentally - my rev 1 G3, 300MHz, (320 megs of RAM, a 100 gig, 10 gig, and 6 gig HDs, and DVD-ROM), is solid on 10.3. 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit painful; by 10.2 it was all good.
 
I am running a B&W 400mhz G3 with 1 gig of ram.
ATI 7000 Radeon video card
Two hard drives, a 20 with OS9 installed and a 30 with OSX installed both attached to a Accard ATA controller --- The thing runs great! And is awesome for storage, server duties and browsing… Once I encoded a DVD – Video_TS folder to AVI (compressed down to a 1024meg AVI file) and it took a little over 12 hours with the CPU @ 75% and above, which I think is pretty good considering the CPU is a 333 from a beige that has been over clocked. Stable though.
 
Very cool with the upgrades guys. I'm an hour away from getting an Apple branded Zip Drive off ebay with G3 and G4 bezels.
 
i would definately go with X on it. it may seem sluggish if you are used to a dual g4 or something like that, but with the 20gig drive and 512mb i think it is still very usable.
 
I have a Frankenmac B&W G3: G4 logic board w/ PCI graphics card slot, 500 MHz IBM G3 w/ 1 MB L2 Cache (from http://www.macsales.com/), 768 MB RAM, OEM 12 GB internal HD, Adaptec 2930 Ultra SCSI w/ 18 GB IBM internal HD, external LaCie Big Disk Extreme 320 GB Firewire 800/400/USB 2.0 triple interface, external GVP 52X/52X/26X CD burner, and Mac OS X 10.3.8. This computer starts up in approximately 1 minute, burns CDs 700 MB CDs in about 7 to 8 minutes, and is fine for cruising the internet, wordprocessing, spreadsheets, etc... It is a little slow at rendering sophisticated graphics, but generally quite usable. The 500 IBM G3 that I purchased from http://www.macsales.com/ did not come with the proper heat sink; it came with the heat sink for a 400 MHz processor, so I bolted on an AMD mini processor cooling fan on the heatsink and it runs fine; the fan plugs into one of the stray hard drive power lines dangling from the power supply. Mac OS X runs faster than Mac OS 9 ever did, just make sure to load up or max-out the RAM to 1 GB if you can.
 
UPDATE:

Well the G3 finally came today, along with a free matching blue keyboard and mouse! To my suprise, it booted up to a clean install of OS 9.2.2!! This makes me very happy and I like using OS 9 on this machine. It's very quick now that I have 448mb of RAM in the G3. However, I tried throwing in a 2nd 80gb hard drive and it bugged out at me and wouldnt boot up. So....if you have any idea why, lemme know. All that's left is to swap out the current CDROM in there for my DVDROM drive.

Anyone ever upgrade a G3 CPU? That's prob the only thing left I'll want to do. :)

Oh! And I'll get pics soon considering my apartment is all gadget and macked out...the G3 is an interesting looking piece.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top