Thinking about buying a used Mac

Vard

Vard

Looking for progress
OK...so I am thinking about buying a used Mac and just wanted to bounce the specs off of everyone to see if it's worth it.

Blue and White Apple Macintosh G3
500 MHz Sonnet Encore CPU
1 GB Memory
20 GB ATA 100 Hard Drive
ATI Rage 128 Graphics Controller
SIIG ATA 100/133 IDE Controller
4X CD-R Drive
Mac OS X v10.2.2 and 9.2.2 Preloaded
2 Firewire Ports
2 USB Ports
10/100 Ethernet Port
1 ADB Port
Internal Sound In/Out

The guy wants $350. Is this worth it?

thanks,
Eddie
 
Hard to tell. What'll you use it for? 500MHz G3 is a little "five years ago", but the 1GB RAM could hold it up and running...
 
A bit of surfing and text worked...but the big gun will be running Protools LE with an Mbox for recording music. I called Digidesign and got the tech guy to admit (after a lot of talking) that even though they don't support G3's anymore, Protools runs fine on a G3, albeit slower than it would on my G4.

Later,
Eddie
 
I'd say that's a decent price -- not the BEST price, but not OVERpriced by any means.

You can drop a 500MHz G4 in there for about $260. I've got a G4/400 PCI upgraded to 500MHz with 1GB RAM, and it runs everything I need it to just fine. That includes surfing the net, email, word processing, PhotoShop, Illustrator, Quark, and a bunch of other DTP programs. Hell, even Final Cut Express runs good on it, although it takes a while to export stuff.

I'm kind of a Mac aficionado, and I've got three of them -- a G4/400 upg. to 500, a B/W G3 350 and an old PowerMac 8500 upgraded to a 400MHz G3. I can accomplish all the aforementioned tasks with ease on any of those machines. But none of them would be comparable to your 1GHz, and you may be a little disappointed going backwards.

If you've got the cash and like tinkering with older machines like I do, go for it. If you're looking for power or something new, save your money. For roughly four times times that price, you can get a brand-new G4 1.25GHz from the Apple Store.
 
Thanks for the feedback. That whole 4 times the price thing is what was getting me. My wife would kill me if I bought another NEW Mac before the Dual is paid. I don't think the speed thing is going to be a major headache for me, I still have my QuickSilver. It's going in my brothers apt where we are building a music studio. The only thing I'll ever use it for is running the recording equipment. My brother will use it for web surfing and writing--but snice he's moving up from an IBM ThinkPad that sports a 90 Mhz proc and 32 meg of ram, I don't think he'll be disappointed.

After watching what some of the B/W's were going for on Ebay, I feel pretty confident that this is a decent deal for what we are going to be using it for. Like I said, I still have my QuickSilver.

Later,
Eddie
 
It is a descent deal. It is great if you allready have a monitor. If not, a newer, but used, iMac or eMac would be faster and maybe cheaper since you dont have to buy monitor. But not as easy to upgrade.
 
Bobw....thanks for the advice. Nice to see other PA people here.

Decado, I have a monitor. Aside from the Mac, the only other thing we need to get (at least until we decide to jump to the next step of recording) is the Mbox. That's gonna run us another $400, but we've got it, so we just have to wait a couple of weeks to finish building the studio, put it all together and start jammin. I am pretty stoked about this whole thing.

Thanks to everyone for the replies. I think it's gonna be cool.

Later,
Eddie
 
Diablo...I surely will. Don't get your hopes too far up. We're going very budget (hence the 4 year old Mac). That said, I think it will be pretty cool for what we wanna do. I'll get them up.

BobW...Sorry to say I don't. I was drug here by my wife. She, or someone in her family surely will. Family of yours?

Later,
Eddie
 
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