G3 Beige question

T

TheUnknown20

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Hiya, it's me, TheUnknown. My old account screwed up somehow. Anyway, here's the question.

I'm considering trading in my old mac for the G3 Beige with 8.0(my friend will upgrade it to 9.0 for me) and I was wondering if it can be upgraded to OSX without any performance problems and such?
 
I've heard of people running X on a Beige G3, but I've never seen it run on a Beige. I have a B&W, and graphics are slow on this (PCI 32 MB Rage 128). If you're planning on using X, I'd seriously consider upgrading the video card to something better than the 2 MB that comes with the beige.

MP
 
TheUnknown20 said:
Hiya, it's me, TheUnknown. My old account screwed up somehow. Anyway, here's the question.

I'm considering trading in my old mac for the G3 Beige with 8.0(my friend will upgrade it to 9.0 for me) and I was wondering if it can be upgraded to OSX without any performance problems and such?
Click to expand...

You can install and run up to Jaguar (10.2.8). Panther will not work (yet) You should give it as much RAM as you can (beige will take up to 3-256 MB PC-100 SDRAM) This model has problems with large HD volumes larger than 8 GB. If you want to install Jaguar on a larger HD, you must partition the drive, with the first partition less than 8 GB, and install OS X on that partition.
 
X runs fine on a Beige G3, albeit a bit slow but fine.

G3 300 DT, 768mb ram, 30gb WD 7200rpm HD, stock video with 2mb ram.


BTW, I run Photoshop, Illustrator, Macromedia Studio MX, Office X, Filemaker Pro6, etc...no problems. Most of the time I have every app open at once.

The suggestion to max the ram would be a great idea, also upgrade the HD with a good 7200rpm one, just remember to install on a partion LESS than 8gb, NOT 8, LESS THAN 8.

I've run it since the PB release, and currently have been stuck with 10.1.5 since I thought I was getting a new one...now I might be upgrading to Jaguar, depends on how business is in the near future.

Just don't expect a speed demon. Powerlogix has a 800mhz g3 card for 299$; Sonnet has 500mhz ($200), 700mhz ($350), and 1ghz ($500) g4 cards.
 
Sounds good enough to me, at least I can get away from this forsakened machine(wouldn't want to utter the name). And relax in the paradise of the good mac oldie. :)
 
Issues to consider:

I assume you're doing this upgrade vs. a buyon Ebay for financial reasons...

You can run OS X on a Beige G3. I'm doing it too. Upgrade the heck out of it with what ever you can afford:
  • Processor upgrade (upto 1GHZ G4 Zif From Sonnett Tech)
  • Memory upgrade (up to 3 256MB DIMMS)
  • ATI Radeon 7000 PCI Mac 32MB
  • Sonnettech Tempo Trio Card (Add's IDE/Firewire/USB)

You do this your Mac will scream! You can find these used on Ebay all the time and the upgrade will cost thousands less than a new G4
 
You'll be able to push it to 10.2.8, but no further until someone figures out a hack for Panther.
 
Hello, I'm new here and just recently ventured into the world of Macs. I know this is an old post but it's fitting for my first entry. I also have a G3 Beige with 384Mb Ram, 300MHz Proc. an IBM SCSI 7200 18GB HD, SCSI apple CDROM. The HD is 0 and the CD is 1.

From experience with this machine I can give you some pointers. First if you're going to install more RAM be absolutely certain you buy ram that is 66 MHz compatible, all PC100 is not backwards compatible to PC66!

Second, if you plan on using the internal graphics get a 4Mb VRAM upgrade (if you haven't already) from E-bay, there plentiful and do wonders for your video.

One other thing, it is possible to use more than an 8gig partition for OSX on the first partition. You will encounter some anomalies that aren't really that much of a bother.

Here's how I did it, I booted an OS 9 CD, partitioned my 18 gig into two drives. First drive is 14gig, the second being of course 4gig or something near that. Then I installed 9 with all the upgrades yada, yada to the second partition. Then I first tried to boot the OSX CD with no luck at all (you get a circle with an slash though it on the screen every time)

So undeterred I booted into 9 inserted the OS X CD and clicked the install icon in the CD. The installer did some pausing blah blah blah, and then said to install X reboot now. Success! Booted and ran the installer with no trouble.

The problem now is trying to boot to X when turning the machine on after sitting powered down a while. It won't! I just hold down Command option Del shift key combo and let it boot to 9. Then select X as the start up disk while in 9. This works every time, but I'm thinking that maybe if I reverse the partitioning scheme, 9 on the 4gig first partition and X on the second 14gig this problem might go away. I don't know. Maybe I screwed it up. It just seems to be hit or miss whether it'll boot to X on the first attempt. It will always boot to X from 9. If I try it differently with better results I'll let you know.

Anyway, OSX works just fine on this machine. It won't set any speed records but it's more than acceptable. Just Ram the Ram to it!
 
I have a 9600/200MP in my office that has been upgraded to a G4 450 and thats about it. Well, its got a whopping 4gb scsi hd :D
I am using it as a file server. It preforms this job just fine, but surfing is slow and graphics in general are pretty slow.

I know that some people will disagree with me, but I found 10.1 to be much snappier on this machine that 10.2. I've noticed a sharp decrease in GUI responsiveness since I did a clean install on 10.2.


If you can shoehorn a ATI 7000 in your case your graphics will be much nicer with 10.X and get some RAM, at least 512.
 
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