What to do with a G3 Mac, and old computers, like P3, 450mhz

[Santilli]

Hi
I've been watching ebay on G3, 333mhz towers, and for the amount of money people pay, it's almost not worth selling.

I never use the thing, except if I'm teaching school. Then, since schools use mostly macs, the old os, old little programs, etc. and the Lombard, make a very nice combination.

Problem is, between the SBS PCI extension box, Raid external tower box, etc. I'm beggining to wonder what happens when we go to a non-scsi base, or, will all this stuff still work with 64 bit pci slots?

I could use some extra money, but, from the looks of things, it isn't worth selling.

Another problem is the OS. The beige I have has a scsi Cheetah 10k on an UW card, to accomodate the external uw cheetahs I have, and, it has a
Voodoo 5500 video card, which is supposed to have excellent graphics
and, that seems to be the case. However, no drivers for Jaguar, much less Panther.

I like OS X, and run it on my laptop, no problems.

Maybe I can donate it to a school and write it off on taxes?

Same problem with a 450 P3 I setup for my girlfriends law office.

Never been used, sitting around, great components, works fine, but, selling it is almost not worth the hassle.

Suggestions, ideas??

Thanks

gs

 

[Santilli]

I've been thinking about this over night. The new macs may devalue my mac even more, or, they might come out with another upgrade, faster then the current 1 ghz for 300 dollars upgrade.

Problem with macs is everytime you look at something like that, and the amount of speed it really increases, you have to look at the pc side, and say,
"Gee, for that much, I can buy a real nice Supermicro board, server style, and be able to add new goodies that are the next generation of speed down the line."

But, whatever. Looks like storage is the best place for it, for a while...

s

 

[blakerwry]

heh, i know how you feel. PCs de value so much that they're almost not worth selling if they're more than a couple yers old.

The machines you mention are still perfectly usable and would make fine PCs for the majority of home or office users I know. Maybe you could tune the systems and give them to a friend or family member who is in need of a PC.

Or perhaps you could use them as a secondary PC if you have any use for them around the house or office.

 

[Mercutio]

I'd say upgrade the thing. It actually makes some kind of economic sense to get a G4 upgrade for that box, unlike a PC, where it's pretty much the same price to just buy a whole second PC.

How much would it take to get it to run OS X?

 

[Santilli]

I've thought about that. First off, it has only 3 pci slots.

USB takes one, Scsi UW the other, and Voodoo 5500 for the last one.

The voodoo has no drivers under OS X, and, from what I can gather, niether does any old scsi card avaliable.


So, if I upgrade to OS X, I have to pull the Scsi drives, replace the Voodoo with a current graphics card, since I don't think my old Nexus GA
is supported, or, use on board video, which has only 6 mb of ram.

I would also have to buy an IDE drive, and hook it up to the crippled, 16 mb/sec ide channel on the mobo, or, buy a decent ide card for the mac, which costs almost as much as a scsi card.

Then, it still might not work. I do have an old Maxtor laying around that I might be able to try it with, if I can figure out how to get it out of the box it's in.

The upgrades for cpus for macs, that are desireable, are the 1ghz G3 upgrades, for 300 dollars. They don't seem to make that much difference in real life apps, from others tests.

Plus, I can take that money and buy a new motherboard and cpu for my pc, for about the same cost.

I was using it yesterday, and as it's configured now, with 9.2, it works, but is ok, not fast.

I think I may hold onto it, since it runs a bunch of hardware that I would have to throw away, like a Nikon AX-1200, and a bunch of externals drives as well, that I use.

So, to summerize, I think the current fastest G4 upgrades are about 400 dollars, and, the g3, 300 dollars.

Buying a new video card is out of the question, and I suspect my apple oem uw card will never be supported in OS X.

I was thinking of using the 450 P3 as a server. But, it would take removing the G3 from it's current position. Still, it would at least be useable.

I could reformat the disks on the raid array, and use those as pc storage, but I would need an UW card for my PC, probably a new mobo, since I think I've used all the pc slots as well. Need to check.

Check that. I just remembered I have a uw scsi card laying around, 2940, and it's pc...

Now if I can figure out how to back up my information on the mac...

s

 

[Fushigi]

Mac OS 9+ or OS X: USB 2 + Firewire + ATA133: http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0157421

That would give you good ATA support, USB 2 & firewire, and open up a slot.

 

[Santilli]

Someone once told me that you really should pick one or the other.

I'm sort of stuck in between. I like the mac g3, and, I really like the Lombard. It's by far the better laptop. The other is a Panasonic running 98 the best, and 2000 if you want to be frustrated(driver for touch pad is non-existent, so you are constantly moving the cursor by accident).

However, there is no denying the major cost savings of using pc's, and, once you are using them all the time, and find out all the little tricks, they are usually just a little harder to configure then macs.

However, schools are usually using macs around here, thus I'm not willing to give away a perfectly good computer, with tons of peripherals, for free.

The only money I MAY spend on it is upgrading to a faster CPU. The only thing is, everytime I consider it, the mac cpu upgrades cost as much as a pc mobo upgrade, and cpu upgrade, together.

Yesterday I spent the day clearing the mac area out, and converting the raid box to pc.It works fine.

The mac already has an ATTO UW oem card in it, running a 10 K 18 gig cheetah. For half thecost of the ATA133 card, 75 dollars I saw yesterday, somone is selling another dual channel atto 160 card. It's supported in OS 9 and windows 2000.

Considering the cable and terminator are already LVD, that would probably be the way to go, with a single 15.3K Cheetah in the future.

Course the longer I wait, the cheaper that stuff gets...

Now, on to ebay projects...

s

 

[Howell]

You might be able to put BSD on there. It should run well.

 

[LiamC]

Found a use for my Celeron 300A/BH6.

Windows 98SE and Terror From The Deep.

I have a bootable Win98SE partition on my nForce 2, but old DOS games do not recognise the sound hardware, as the IRQ's are all funny.

So I have an old DOS game machine sitting in the corner for when I get all nostalgic like

 

[Santilli]

Well, I bought a switch that allows me to use the same keyboard and monitor for both computers, at a double tap of one key.

I've connected the raid box to it, and back up files to that box, through intranet.

gs