hello, all. some of you may know my current Mac setup, if not here it is:
Powerbook 100
Powerbook 145
Macintosh Plus
Macintosh LC III
I have been interested in getting something than can run OSX. I have been scouring Ebay, looking at the G3 and G4 imacs. however, I realized I want something portable. Atleast a G3. I have came up with a Powerbook G3 Wallstreet II 266mhz 2gb HDD, 96mb ram, with a bad battery and PMU for $50. these can run up to OS X 10.2.8 accoring to apple-history.com.
so, once I aquire said wallstreet, what could I do with it in the way of modifications? I looked at the case mods, but I want it to LOOK stock. I know about the Sonnet upgrades, and if I can get enough cash, I could buy one. def a larger HDD and more Ram (atleast 256mb? ) I dont have wifi, but I do have eternet. any other suggestions?
oh, I am in transition completely to Macs (my parents still use IBMs, and that is what I grew up on and used entirely until the fall of 2003. ), so I am selling a Compaq Armada 4220t that needs a HDD, has 64mbram, 266mhz PI w/MMX (I assume a G3@ 266mhz kicks a petium MMX @266mhz's ass.).
thanks. -digital 
Holy Moley! You're about as far back in the stone ages as I am! I don't own a computer that can vibrate faster than 233MHz.
Actually, I have two Macs that are running G3 processors at 233MHz and both can be "sped up" with relative ease, but I've no immediate need. I don't run OS X on any of my machines. My G3s run 9.1 and 9.2. I have two 604 based machines. My 9500 runs 9.1 and my 7300 runs NetBSD 2.0.2. I also have a 603 based Performa that is currently running 7.5.x and a 601 based 7200 that is sitting idle.
In the 68k world, I have an LC III and a Quadra 700 that are each running NetBSD 2.1_RC6. Of course, the LC III is running the softfloat build because it lacks a hardware FPU at the present time. I have a Quadra 950 that I'm about to install either Debian Linux or NetBSD on. I also have a plain Jane LC and an LC 575 that are sitting idle.
Tonnes of fun!
well, my mom is rocking a celeron @ 1.8ghz on her 2 year old toshiba laptop, my dad had aP3 550 (which I upgraded for him from 450) but the mobo fried. I still have a shuttle PC with a 486, but no idea what to use it for. My LC III has been OCed to 33mhz, but the audio is shot. My old biology teacher gave me the plus, which is an upgraded 128/512k that he saved from the dumpster. Since then, I have been slowly working my way up thru apple history, and I think I am ready fora G3. -digital
Don't screw around trying to get OS X going on a piece of junk if you don't already have a good OS X box.
GET A MINI
They are cheap as hell, and considering the PITA you are in for, it will end up saving you time and money.
Seriously... we do it to ourselves... cut yourself off at the pass.
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Please accept my most sincere condolences in your time of suffering. I feel that your future is bright, and that your quest for a modern Macintosh will bring untold joy and happiness to you and your loved ones.
Yes, the Lord does work through men. Clearly the Lord has used you to lift your father from the depths of WinTel hell. Let us pray that your father will find salvation through the purchase of a new Mac Mini and/or iMac. Can I have an Amen, brothers and sisters.
And let us pray that you may be shuttled from the evils of the humdrum PC in your possession, and into the fond company of the Macintosh G3 that your heart and soul desire...
Okay, I'm gonna stop this now. I don't want the good Reverend to accuse me of moving in on his action.
Agreed. Get a mini, best bang for the buck if you want to run OS X. I would add that you make sure you put in at least 512mb ram (it's not too difficult to upgrade yourself).
you can install 10.2 on a beige and will run just fine as it is on my beige G3 266mhz in my sig and xpostfacto4 10.4 will fit and run good with max ram and a faster cpu at least G4 500-1000mhz and a good pci video card like a ati radion 7000 or 9200 pci. There is nothing wrong in wanting a beige G3 and upgrading it.
Yea it would be less painfull with a Mac mini but if he want's to spend money on a beige G3 as im going to do the same i have no complaints on doing so. I like upgradeing older machines. The last time i looked a mini cant boot 9.2.2 and classic wont run some stuff at all or not as good as 9.2.2 and a beige is cheaper than a B&W or yikes.
There is people out there like me that want to still use the classic Mac like the beige and are willing to put money in it to max it out
i thought he wanted a portable unit? but i myself would rather have a B&W over and beige box unless your in desperate need of something slow, still need the use of floppy's or hate the color teal. a good rev2 B&W will run panther very well, as i use it now and it runs os9 insanely fast. if theres somthing else ive learned, its never go with the first generation of a new product... not only that, you get firewire with the B&W. that right there just made it so much easier for fast external storage. if you wanted to go imac route dont expect it to last long but will run as well as the B&W if its a rev.E or newer.
well... sounds like someone's ready to sell. I think you better work on your closing.
its $379 friggin' bucks! Give the kid a break and a good tip, he's looking to move to Mac, not geek out.
Maybe its a little cheaper to do the beige thing, so for about $30-$70 including shipping you get yourself a nice beige... upgrade the proc to G4 for maybe between $40-$90, max out the RAM for about $60, then get yourself a copy of Tiger for about $100... so we're looking at between $230-$320... and that's not counting a decent sized hard drive. And even then the whole thing is speculative because of everything that can go wrong... so these numbers end up being on the conservative side. $60 bucks more and its a machine easily 5-10 times as fast and a years worth of support.
I don't think there's anything wrong with fixing up old macs and making them useful... guess what I've been doing all day? Screwing around with getting a IIci online (didn't make it yet... want it to be perfect, ya know?) and throwing another 9gig drive in the ol' Sawtooth, and the whole time thinking about what to do with the Quadra 650. But I have a newish PowerBook that kicks ass. Maybe those machines would be fine for an individual that just wants to surf, but for me, they are back up back ups... turning them all into servers so they can sit there all day and take up electricity... but as far as the nine's go, they don't even get a one.
Don't fsck around... get a mini and call it half a decade, because that's how long you'll use it without trouble.
No im not selling anything and no i dont need to work on my closeing cause it isnt a closeing For a sell. All I was doing was just stateing that there isnt anything wrong in getting a beige and maxing it out. every one on every forum act's like its a sin to max a beige out. this is what i want to do with the stuff I got. There is alot of people with fully upgraded Beige Mac's pre G3 and G3 and B&W G3
Im going to stick with my beige G3. i have to much classic software that wont run under classic mode in OS X to buy a mini that wont even boot the real 9.2.2 . I will just spend the money on this beige G3 AIO to up it to the max and finishing to build a kick butt pc for reasonable price cause all I need is a AMD athlon XP 3200+ and ram and a hdd to complete it.
Yea the Wallstreet is a nice laptop with upgrade's. and the lombard or however it's spelled is a good laptop with upgrades or the colored ibooks are even good but i dunno about them running OS X tho. i dont think a mini is not quite portable enuff like a laptop is. sorry that i skimmed the post and didnt see he wanted a laptop
thank you all for your kind suggestions. I may get a used powerbook/iBook later on, but not right now. I have been PMed an offer I cant refuse: a B&W G3 350mhz 256mb ram with no hard drive (I have hard drives galore), for $30 plus shipping. a much more stable OS X machine. plus, I can run classic on it too.
This hasnt turned me off from a portable. Like I said, if I can scrape together the cash to procure a G3 or early G4 portable, I will. I dont really need OS X on that, so I will run classic on it. I am more used to classic anyways, only having sampled OSX at the apple stores, where I have had hours of work on OS 9 on my school's clamshell (yes, clamshell) iBooks, and G4 towers. Plus, I havnt run anything higher than 7.5.5 on my LC III. I need to get ahold of 7.6.0, so I can bump it up to 7.6.1. or even as high as 8.0 or 8.1 with that LC III hack, if I have the time. Since I am in the process of moving, I will be very busy right up through the end of the year, so I wont have time for much of this until next year.
If I do get the G3 B&W, I'M gonna have to hit the local Salvation Army thrift shop for a used VGA monitor. or mayby I can mooch one off my job (i'm the IT guy!! ) -digital
No one doubts your ability to get an older system going... but you are trying to make "the switch" and this is not the way to do it...
Again, save yourself the bother, the headaches, the wasted time, the highly speculative investment and the possibility of despising Apple and Macs forever.
...
The reason the machine is so cheap is probably because it has a rev 1 board. The rev 1s are notorious for their drive I/O problems. The only way to see if its a rev 2 board is to check the motherboard and see if it has the "402" chip, by the PCI bus.
The B&W, I think my fellow fritterer's will agree, is hardly a stable OS X box (though I am sure there are braggers ready to post about how stable their B&W is in OS X, please, spare me). It is a missing link, and still desired, as it still runs OS 9, is highly upgradeable with its proc zif slot (though the g4 upgrades are NOT cheap) and has an adb port, and the ability to put a serial port where the modem goes, and you can run scsi off the PCI bus. Its a great machine, really... I have one... and its going to be hard to part with... and although still supported for even Tiger by Apple, the posts to this board will show you that it has a dark side, too.
I would suggest this be your second purchase, because by the time you are finished getting it to be a very nice workstation machine, you will have wasted a lot of time and money, easily the cost of a mini or two.
What is your aversion to buying a new machine? Its a lousy $379!! If its just out of range... simply wait a few weeks and save up, it will totally be worth it and I promise you you will have a bad ass/problem free system long before your ever get a B&W close to it.
350MHz G3 ≠ 1.25GHz G4
Yea i would see if its a rev 2 or not cause like catmistake said if its a rev 1 it has some issues. I was given a good deal on these 2 beige G3 systems so that is why im sticking with them hek they was free. the B&W will take the same upgrades as the beige will. If im not mistaken the B&W has its quirks with A fast CPU faster than a G4 600mhz i could be wrong. I think they solved this problem but im not for shure tho. once i buy the upgrades for this Beige the upgrades can be easly moved to a B&W or Yikes but that is when I buy a B&W or Yikes down the road.
one thing i can say as being an owner of my now second B&W, DONT TRY TO OVER CLOCK IT. im pretty sure that mine died because of that, even though i didnt leave it like that for long. mine even has the REV2 board. they are very picky about ram and still picky about hard drives. once you work the bugs out of them they work fine. i just got panther on mine running a g4 500mhz. pretty solid, but havnt played any serious games that would use that power yet so im not sure if its rock solid. basically anything that old is going to have its problems. alot of macs can be made to run the way you want to if you follow instructions and go through the checklist of items if somthing is wrong. getting a parts machine and building it up doesnt happen in 3 min. and when it all comes down to it, it depends what you want to do with the machine... For os9, alot of g3's run that really well, while the B&W is entry level for OSX, it gets you basic programs but dont expect to burn movies or garage band or things like that. a G4 is minimum for strong OSX usage. the mini is an Awsome choice if you dont ever intend on making it better, or using os9. i hope my advice has been helpful and doesn't seem demanding in anyway as it is my opinion.
well, my major problem is price, and it will take me more than a few weeks to procure even $100, with all my other expensies. Secondly, I DO want a machine that can run OSX and OS 9, and I do like that ADB port, because I can see myself using it alot. I figure that The B&W G3 is perfect for my needs, and that Mac mini is just too damn butt ugly, IMHO. Sorry if I offend any of you Mini lovers, but that is just what I think, though that slot load drive is sweet, but I can easily add one to a B&W.
Belive me, I am no stranger of computer headaches. I am sure the ones I get from working with Wintel machines are much worse than any I could experience with a mac. For Example, imagine having to repartition, reformat, and Reinstall Windows 95 on 30 Pentium I machines. you cant, but I can. they gave me one hell of a fight, too. So, if I can deal with them and get all of those up and running before a deadline, I am sure that a G3's troubles are gonna be trivial.
And yes, I do know about the rev. 1 mobo problems, and I have asked if this is a Rev. 2. if not, I can get a Rev. 2 mobo off ebay for cheap. Besides, I plan on using only one hard drive in it anyways. From what I read, the Rev. 1 has a problem with slave Hard drives. If I am worng, please correct me. what is the complete list of Rev. 1 mobo quirks?
thanks. -digital
Best place to look for that would be the G3 systems page or FAQ at xlr8yourmac.com
... and people ... edit your quotes!!!
I was reading on system compairison B&W and beige with diffrent upgrade cpu's. I was looking at the sonnet 1000mhz G4 for both systems and it looks like there isnt to much of a gap in in proformance look at the sonnet 1000 G4 for both systems and compare them. all i seen was a few points diffrence . and if i disable the onboard video it will no be a bottle neck as if it was still enabled
link
cpu shootout B&W and beige
yea the B&W will have an edge on games cause of the 66mhz pci port for video cards but that is all i seen on that test resaults on the link