Help - I've inherited an Apple G3

[Adcadet]

As some of you know, I've started a new job recently and am much much happier (if you're curious, there's some info at www.tc.umn.edu/~calv0016/research). This job is great - it pays very well, it comes with a tuition benefit, my parking is paid for, and I get a spaceous office (granted, it's a converted lab that I have to share with one other person). I even get my own computer and network access (regularly get >500kbps download)! The only problem - the computer is an old Apple G3 running OS9.something.
Shock! Horror! Dread! The worst part - the Mac comes with that stupid small black keyboard and hockey puck mouse. Ug!

Like most of you here (but not all, hence why I come here for help), I'm a PC person. I know Windows pretty well. I know a little about Linux. But I know only the basics about Macs. Here's my question: do any of you think the computer would be faster for basic tasks (writing papers, email, internet surfing) running Linux (Mandrake, since that's the distro that comes with a PPC version that I'm most familure with). Or would OS9 be the fastest? Would I just be better off bringing in my trusty IBM Thinkpad (Celeron 366/128 running WinXP - granted it's a bit pokey with XP, but FSAA is nice on the LCD!). Of course, I may just need to use the darn machine for a while to see if OS9 is satisfactory...but I'd prefer to run Linux if just for the experience. I'm wondering what people around here think, especially those who have used multiple OSes extensively.

On a side note: the IT dept warned me at length that while I can run any OS I want, they won't support it. But I could see the guy's smile as he talked about Linux and he seems really interested to see Linux on PPC.

On another side note: the guy who's computer I'm inheriting just got a new G4 with a 17" LCD display....very nice display, especially running OSX (I had to try very hard not to lick the screen)

Can most Macs boot straight to CD, or is there something you have to do to allow that (in the BIOS) - and how would I get there (can you hit F1 on a Mac to get to the BIOS)? Can Mac OS9 dual boot with Linux?

Thoughts...suggestions...comments....mild slurs...provocative but thoughtful comments....?

Thanks!
Adcadet

 

[Cliptin]

Do the make "OS9 for Dummys", or is that redundant?

 

[Buck]

I would stick with OS9.

There is no special key to enter the BIOS, when the system boots, you see the BIOS. Part of the GUI is in the BIOS, that is the beauty with Macs. Yes, the CD-ROM should be bootable.

 

[timwhit]

Even if you have never used a Mac before, it is very easy to pickup. Things are generally very intuitive. Have you considered trying OSX on it? It might run a little slow, but it sure looks cool.

However, if you feel the need to put Linux on the machine. I would probably put Yellow Dog Linux on there. Their website is www.yellowdoglinux.com it appears to be down right now though.

 

[Adcadet]

I have used Macs before for simple things (web surfing with IE, Word to write papers) but I've never had the opportunity (to put it one way) to actually have any control over a Mac.

 

[Mercutio]

LinuxPPC is pretty nice. Or Open/NetBSD.

For look and feel, MacOS is really nice. I wouldn't complain about it. For myself I'd probably install Linux, just because I'm used to it. But I'd say that you should give OS9 a try first. It's a pretty nice environment.

I will warn you that it's not terribly stable, especially if you're used to Linux or Windows 2000. So that might be a deciding factor.

 

[Cliptin]

I once had to use a MAC. The Win95 PS2s in the IBM lab were all taken. The interface may be intuitive for some but I'd personally rather have an Etch-a-Sketch.

Go for Linux. You'll sleep better at night knowing you've compiled every bit of juice out of the machine.

 

[Adcadet]

LinuxPPC is pretty nice. Or Open/NetBSD.
I will warn you that it's not terribly stable, especially if you're used to Linux or Windows 2000. So that might be a deciding factor.

After going from Win98 to Win2k to WinXP, I have developed a hatered for instability. Actually I guess this is why I don't like Macs very much - I had to use iMacs for some data analysis and literally couldn't go more than fifteen minutes without a crash.

 

[Santilli]

Use 9.2 all the time, and I like it

I think you should just leave it alone, and use it.

Our school has a variety of macs, and, I find the best computers are in the tech lab, and they are all macs, running 9x.

I run it on my laptop, and, it's slow to boot, but once it's up, it's dead stable.

OS X might not work on that model, which you did not give us any details on, and, depending upon general components, the machine should be fine.

Don't know much about yellowdog, so I can't be much help on that end.

Give me some more details, and I might be able to give you better advice. Also, any desktop is going to be better, and faster, then a laptop, if for no other reason then the hard drive.

I use ramdisks on my laptop, and they really help, along with a ton of ram, something you can't utilize on a pc, or in OS X, to my knowledge.

Rambunctious is a great ramdisk program, and, I have many other tweaks that don't work in OS X, but work great in 9x.

I will say that browsing speed sucks, using IE, or Netscape, compared to using 2000 and IE.

Why would that happen????

Use another browser...
gs

 

[Adcadet]

Santilli (et al) - I'd love to give you more details, but I have none. I suspect tomorrow I may actually have the computer delivered. At that point I'll start poking around and report back what I find.

 

[Santilli]

OK: What are you comparing it too?

I find a 333 mhz mac fine, as long as it's compared to something reasonable...

Don't know what your standard, most used computer is...
gs

 

[Tannin]

Santilli knows more practical stuff about Macs than most people here. I say listen to Greg. As for browsers, Opera is available for the Mac isn't it? Opera will cream any flavour of IE or Netscape or Mozilla. They don't call it "the fastest browser on earth" for nothing.

 

[Tannin]

Sorry, I thought I was on Storage Review, not Storage Forum. Make that "Santilli knows more practical stuff about Macs than anyone here."

 

[Adcadet]

Sorry, I thought I was on Storage Review, not Storage Forum. Make that "Santilli knows more practical stuff about Macs than anyone here."

hehehe.

dang it's late....must sleep

 

[Cliptin]

Sorry, I thought I was on Storage Review, not Storage Forum. Make that "Santilli knows more practical stuff about Macs than anyone here."

hehehe.

dang it's late....must sleep

On a more serious note, since you are so concerned with stabitlity (and who isn't) you might ask to get the software reloaded. I'd hate for you to start hating the machine just because the joker before you boogered the OS up.

Listen to Santilli. Listen to Santilli.

 

[CougTek]

As for browsers, Opera is available for the Mac isn't it? Opera will cream any flavour of IE or Netscape or Mozilla. They don't call it "the fastest browser on earth" for nothing.

Well, believe it or not but Opera is actually noticeably slower than all the others on all the systems I tried it. The main advantage of Opera is that it's nice-looking, but it definetly not cream recent Mozilla releases in term of quickness.

 

[Tannin]

Then one of us is smoking da green stuff. Molasses is faster than Mozilla.

It's not too bad once it starts up, but oh! that load time is dreadful. I mean, I'm alredy running it on an Athlon XP 1800 with an X15 - what's their recommended hardware requirement? A Cray?

 

[Mercutio]

Edit > Preferences > Advanced > "Enable Quick Launch". Moz starts up with your PC, just like IE (er, on a Windows box).

Opera the web browser just doesn't have anything on any version of Mozilla since the preview releases (about 18 months ago).

 

[CougTek]

Tony,

You can also create a new profile on your latest installed Mozilla version and delete your older one. I know I had some profile-related problems that I dragged from release 0.91 to 0.94 before I realized that strarting from scratch might solve the problem. There has been several speed improvements between 0.97 and the actual release. If your Mozilla experience isn't too recent, you might be surprised by the latest release.

I don't use quick launch and Mozilla 1.0RC1 still opens pages faster than Opera 6.01.

 

[Tea]

It's a fresh install, or nearly so. 0.99.

Any program that needs a fast-load kludge is exactly that: a bloated kludge. Good God, we are talking about a web browser here, not the Brooklin Bridge.

Page rendering speed? I wouldn't know, I'm on dial up. Load speed is what I notice. And if a program is so slow that I notice load speed on an XP 1800 512MB DDR X15, then it's seriously slow.

I like Mozilla, use it third in line behind Opera and IE (number one on my OS/2 machines, of course, as OS/2 Opera is terrible - or it was last time I tried the Alpha), use it every day but just a little bit. But if I were using, say, a P-450 and an IDE drive I doubt that I'd even install it. It really, really needs a code shrink.

Apart from that, it's pretty good. It badly misses Opera's "open new window in background" feature (which even IE sort of manages, insofar as you can open new windows and they dont full-bloody screen you) and it still has trouble rendering table widths correctly, but it's in the ball-park.

Just too big and too slow.

(Mercutio crosses Tea off his Xmas card list. Oh well.)

 

[CougTek]

Mozilla bloated? The whole installation file is 9.8MB and the one of Opera 6.01 with Java support is 10.7MB. Let's not even think about the size of IE. Mozilla isn't perfect, but it's not exactly bloated either, at least not when compared to similar softwares.

 

[Tea]

So, if it's not bloated why does it take so long to load?

 

[Mercutio]

That's all the quality, being transferred into RAM.

Tea might be off my xmas card list, except for the little fact that I don't celebrate xmas.

 

[Tea]

Me neither, Rotund One.

(There. Now I'm really off the list.)

 

[Bartender]

Quit monkeying around.

 

[Mercutio]

Bartender, please inform Mr. Wilson we're no longer speaking.

 

[Bartender]

Am I gonna have to put each of you in the corner? If this doesn't get settled, we're goin' for a drinkin' match. You'll both drink until I've determined that peace has been restored and I don't care if it is Saturday morning in Victoria or Friday night in Indiana! The one thing I won't do is resort to violence, but I can still get this childish problem solved.

<Now if only I could get Tea caged, that hairy beast keeps runnin' around the bar, wavin' her arms back and forth, like she's got a new boyfriend or somethin'.>

 

[time]

Exluding cache storage, Mozilla 0.98 takes up about 17MB on disk.

Opera takes less than 5MB.

The slow load time is almost certainly due to Mozilla being composed of more than a hundred separate components. The Mozilla project has tried to lay the groundwork for god knows how many possible future features or directions. Classic over-engineering. The only thing they haven't included is the kitchen sink.

This is what is dooming Mozilla. It's not what the market wanted at all.

Having said that, I use it whenever a site doesn't work with Opera.

 

[time]

Some quick and dirty benchmarks, firstly on a P450 running Win95:

Time to load a local 750kB HTML file (a price list)

Netscape 4.74 - 35 seconds
Mozilla 0.98 - 8 seconds
Opera 6.01 - 5.8 seconds (3.7 to display, 2/3 of file rendered)

On an Athlon 1000 running Win2k:

Time to load a local 750kB HTML file (a price list)

Mozilla 0.98 - 3 seconds (2s to display, maybe all rendered?)
IE 5.0 - 3 seconds (1s to display, first screen only rendered)
Opera 6.01 - 1.7 seconds (1s to display, 2/3 of file rendered)

Time to jump to hyperlinks in the file

IE 5.0 - 0.7 seconds
Mozilla 0.98 - instantaneous
Opera 6.01 - instantaneous

There was no obvious difference at rendering image files, except that I couldn't force Mozilla to refresh its cache (minor bug).

Connected through a gateway to a cable modem, loading of local news site pages was similar for all three browsers. Opera was slightly faster with most pages, but seemed to pause at the end of loading a particular front page, although this did not happen with the other site.

Connected to StorageForum (from Oz don't forget), news stories were roughly the same, as was the forum (some pages faster, some slower). The big difference was when stepping back (or forward) through the viewed pages. Opera and Mozilla were virtually instantaneous (say <0.2 and <0.4 seconds), whereas IE5 took 5 seconds to step back to a large page with 100 posts.

Of course, all this is discounting the effects of caching (except for the back/forward test). If I stop forcing Opera to refresh cache, it's faster than the others. If I turn off uncached images (which is great for dialup), there's no longer any contest.

I imagine Mercutio is basing his comments on the Linux version, where they may be true for all I know.

But there's no doubt CougTek was experimenting with toad skins. :mrgrn:

 

[Santilli]

"what's their recommended hardware requirement? A Cray?

rofl
:lol:

 

[Santilli]

Not to stay on topic, or moot the discussion...

But, the way around browser speed is to load the browser on to a ram disk, screw with the settings to increase cache capacity, and have the cache on the ram disk.

Only browser that works doing this is IE...

Ram disks are wonderful things on macs, and, OS 9x or lower have easy programs that really work.

Macs have advantages. Just found two worms on my computer,...
Never any on macs, it seems.

If reliability is a factor, then I would go with either 8.6 or 9 whatever on the mac.

Are they as good as Yellowdog linux? Don't know, haven't tried it.


Again, this discussion is rather difficult, since we don't know which mac, with what hardware, has been given to you.

I know this maybe hard to believe, but an awful lot of productive work gets done on macs, and, you might find that your experience with a business quality mac is far better then most peoples imac experiments.

I've found a large enough % of imac problems that I don't want to deal with, to justify never purchasing anything less then a tower again from apple.

Would I ever purchase another mac? I don't think so.

At the rate they obselete their hardware, with new versions of their operating system, I would wait until the os was DEAD stable, like 8.6 or 9.1, and then purchase a machine that others had assured me was dead stable with that os.

Plus, the components are just too expensive to have to obselete.

I will say that a g3 333 is STILL a viable computer, 4 years after purchase, with 8.6, and, that while not an Athlon 1.4 ghz, it's still fast enough, provided the proper disk system is installed, read scsi, and usually raid.

Same could also be said of the BX series of chipset motherboards, and a P3 450 MHZ, provided the drive is fast enough.

Suffice to say, that computers of this vintage are much more
hard drive dependent, since they spend more time accessing drives,... due to the slower processors...

gs

 

[Cliptin]

If I turn off uncached images (which is great for dialup), there's no longer any contest.

I imagine Mercutio is basing his comments on the Linux version, where they may be true for all I know.

Remember that Mercutio usually does not even turn on images, if at all at home. Good job time.

 

[Tea]

Indeed, Time, a good job.

I just did a really, really quick and dirty duplicate test: I took the source of www.redhill.net.au/d-c.html, a page with a fair number of tables and lots of embedded images, cut off the </html> at the end, and hit SHIFT-INSERT numerous times to create a file long enough to time the load - 1.6MB in all.

Then, on my XP 1800+, 512MB DDR, W2K and X15, I counted seconds. As near as this ultra-primitive method can make it:

Opera 6.0: 2.5 seconds
Internet Explorer 5.0: 5 seconds
Mozilla 0.99: 12 seconds
Netscape Navigator 4.08: 15 seconds

Then, just for fun, I fired up Navigator 3.08 (which I keep on hand for testing page compatibility with old browsers) and - to my absolute astonishment, it didn't lock up, it didn't drag on for ever, and it rendered the whole page in two or three seconds. I'd have to use something more precise than counting in my head to decide for sure if it's actually faster than Opera, but there is no doubt whatever that it is easily faster than any of the other browsers.

I ran it twice, just to make sure. If I hadn't already been lying down in front of the computer, you could have knocked me down with a hummingbird feather.

Mind you, the end result wasn't pretty, but I guess simply ignoring all that fancy new-fangled CSS stuff has its benefits. Still, we can ignore that, as leaving half the code out is not exactly the best way to improve rendering speed.

Anyway: no doubt about it: Opera whips Mozilla's arse. IE too, though by a smaller margin.

But is there an easy way to time these things a bit more exactly?

 

[CougTek]

Anyway: no doubt about it: Opera whips Mozilla's arse. IE too, though by a smaller margin.

I don't know if you remember it, but some 9-10 months ago, I did the same thing but with the whole ATC thread. I measured the time it took to load the entire page with all the links and etc. Opera was the slowest of the bunch. Even behind Netscape, which was a surprise to me.

I will do the same thing with your page to test the speed of the latest version of all three browsers, but I'm almost sure there's something wrong somewhere somehow with your Mozilla installation.

More later when I'll have run the tests.

 

[Tea]

I have two Mozila installations. The OS/2 version is even slower. But I'll await your report with interest just the same.

 

[Groltz]

I have two Mozila installations. The OS/2 version is even slower. But I'll await your report with interest just the same.

By the way Tony,Opera 6.02 build 1011 has just been leaked. I'm running it, no problems.

 

[Adcadet]

Well, the Big Boss found out that I was thinking of putting a rogue OS on "his" machine (funny, I thought it actually belonged to someone else, but whatever) and discouraged me, since he once had a G3 that they attempted to upgrade to OS9 and failed.

Oh well. This treat to be continued under "Best Mac Apps"

 

[Tea]

Thanks Steve. I think I'll wait for the official release. In fact I haven't upgraded from 6.00 to 6.01 yet, simply because 6.00 is working fine for me. And because I'm lazy, of course.