G3 powerbook upgrade to 10.2 or 10.3?

Q

Qfxz

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I have looked in previously posted forum replies and found nothing or not enough info to answer the following questions:

I have acccess to this laptop: powerbook G3 series; 14.1TFT/233MHz-512K/32MB/2GB HD/4MB video/CD/modem---it is the old barebones black one, has OS 9 on it. I am okay with wiping out OS 9. I have 10.2, 10.3 install CD's and 10.4 install DVD. Which will install? Any of these? Can the RAM be upgraded? How about airport for wireless connections?
I know with firewire I could disk target mode, this has no firewire or I would try transferring 10.2 or 10.3 to it.
Any suggestions other than dumping it?
What is a reasonable value for this machine?


Or the reasonable value for a G4 powerbook, basic unit. I have access to one these as well and surely would like to get it, the price may be prohibitive though. Okay there are a lot of them out there and they are all probably brushed aluminum casings. This one is a 15" (I doubt it is a 17", it might be), right now that is all the info I have. I just need to know a general price range .

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

John Q
 
Qfxz said:
I have acccess to this laptop: powerbook G3 series; 14.1TFT/233MHz-512K/32MB/2GB HD/4MB video/CD/modem---it is the old barebones black one, has OS 9 on it. I am okay with wiping out OS 9. I have 10.2, 10.3 install CD's and 10.4 install DVD. Which will install? Any of these? Can the RAM be upgraded? How about airport for wireless connections?
I know with firewire I could disk target mode, this has no firewire or I would try transferring 10.2 or 10.3 to it.
Any suggestions other than dumping it?
What is a reasonable value for this machine?
Click to expand...
The highest supported operating system for that system is 10.2.8. You have 32 MB of RAM... so at this point you are not going to be running any version of Mac OS X (and really 32 MB isn't enough to run Mac OS 9 very well either).

That system can be upgraded to 512 MB of RAM (which is what this one that I use has). In which case, you could install Mac OS X, but you wouldn't have much room for anything else with a 2 GB hard drive. You can upgrade the hard drive (I have a 40 GB drive in this system) but you'll have to partition any drive over 8 GB in size... your system will only work with Mac OS X installed on an 8 GB (or smaller) volume at the beginning of the drive.

On top of all that, 233 MHz is a bit slow for Mac OS X. It'll work, but a faster processor would be helpful. Because you can't upgrade the VRAM or graphics processor (ATI Rage Lite) on this PowerBook, the next best thing is to hand off some of that work to Altivec on a G4 processor. My PowerBook has a G4 at 500 MHz with 1 MB of L2 cache, which has helped the GUI feel snappier.

Additionally, I have a second hard drive in my system (20 GB drive in the battery expansion bay), a CDRW drive (in the CD-ROM expansion bay) and a USB 2.0 card in one of the PCMCIA slots. And I use the serial port to sync with my Newton... Just to give you an idea what can be done with one of these.

As for what that system is worth as it stands right now... about $175-250. You usually don't find them with that low an amount of memory (64 MB would make it a much better Mac OS 8/9 system).
 
Realistically, the minimum for OSX is a G3 500MHz with 256MB memory, 10GB Hard Drive and OS10.3 (Panther) installed. Anything less and you are going to be running very slowly. With a G4 you can run Panther or Tiger with only a 350MHz processor, although I'd recommend 400MHz as the sensible minimum if you have a choice. Tiger needs lots of memory.
 
SatCure said:
Realistically, the minimum for OSX is a G3 500MHz with 256MB memory, 10GB Hard Drive and OS10.3 (Panther) installed. Anything less and you are going to be running very slowly. With a G4 you can run Panther or Tiger with only a 350MHz processor, although I'd recommend 400MHz as the sensible minimum if you have a choice. Tiger needs lots of memory.
Click to expand...
I strongly disagree with that statement...

Firstly, two of my four Mac OS X systems are running Mac OS X 10.2.8 and are great systems. In a lot of ways 10.2 is better than 10.3 and later (I still use 10.2 more than 10.3 or 10.4). There is nothing realistic about suggesting 10.3 as a minimum.

Secondly, two of my four Mac OS X systems (and not the same two as above) are using G3 processors below 500 MHz (350 and 400 MHz). And I have clients who are using machines with systems running at 300 MHz.

As I suggested in my earlier post, if you are unable to get a faster video card, then turning to a G4 can help. But if you have at least an ATI Rage 128 with 8 MB of VRAM (which both my Pismo G3/400 and iMac G3/350 have) you should have no problem running Mac OS X... and watching DVDs (both of those systems are used to watch DVDs in Mac OS X).

And lastly... 10 GB is not a realistic minimum. A custom install of Mac OS X (with additional languages and printer drivers not installed) requires about 1.5 GB. I've seen Mac OS X used comfortably on a 6 GB drive and had used this PowerBook running Mac OS X from Aug 2002 to Nov 2005 on an 8 GB hard drive.

The only sensible recommendation in that post was memory... the more the better.
 
My own "minimal" systems are:
G4/400 tower with AGP graphics and any HD.
G3/500 iBook with 2 x USB and 10MB HD.

Prices for these on eBay are quite reasonable and the G4 tower is very upgradable. You can fit 2 x 128GB HDs (only 120GB is usable on early models) at a reasonable cost. You can obviously do other upgrades at a cost that would probably be better spent on a later, faster model.

Whatever you buy, I recommend your first money is spent on an external Firewire drive to give you room for backups (and working space in the case of the iBook). Second money should be on memory.
 
Okay, at this point then it would be my best bet to go with the G4 powerbook,
I do not have the specs on that one. As stated, it is brushed aluminum case, 15" screen, yet looking at my flat screen monitor (a 17"), the one I had seen may be a 17". This is about 3 yrs old, barely used.
Any idea what it is worth? I am thinking it would be the basic model that Mac offered at that time. I know little about the powerbooks.

Thanks for all the info from everyone on my this post. For the money and time the G4 will be the way to go if it is not too expensive. I just want to be sure it is not over priced.


John
 
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