6 Jan
2007
6 Jan
'07
8:57 p.m.
I picked up another Mac yesterday--a beige 300 Mhz G3
with 256MB,
and a 15 GB hard disk. It's also got a USB adapter plugged into one
of the PCI slots. It's running OS 9.something. Set me back $20.
Were Zip drives a standard part of these things?
Zip drives were available. I have a beige G3 that is identical to yours,
except that it does have a Zip drive installed in the secondary bay.
On a side-by-side with a Win2K P1 225MHz system with
the same amount
of memory, I think the WIndoze box has snappier response and has
better video.
The beige G3 has only a Rage II+ card by default. The later Revision 2 and
3 use Rage Pro. Thus, I think the video issue you're noticing is probably
the accelerator. The original 300 is almost certainly Revision 1.
You might as well get a Rage Orion and I think you'll find the performance
much better. The Rage Orion is a 16MB Rage 128 PCI card, and I know from
personal experience that it is Mac-compatible and has good performance.
They're pretty cheap on the used market.
I don't care for the Mac monitor that came with
it--has anyone tried
hooking up a fixed-frequency SOG workstation monitor to it? I've got
a nice HP/Sony model that might be a candidate.
If you opt not to get a new video card, just get one of the Mac-VGA
converters and use that with a standard multisync. I think you'll find
that the easiest approach.
The G3 can run up to 10.2.8 without help, or 10.3.9 with XPostFaco, but
you will need a PCI video card if you choose to try that. There are also
some issues with Revision 1 systems booting Mac OS X -- you must ensure
that the boot partition is within the first 8GB. It's simplest just to
partition the disk and install OS X into a new leading 8GB partition, but
if you plan to use OS 9 exclusively this is irrelevant. ROM revision
(something)40F2 is Revision 1 and the System Profiler should tell this to you.
45Fx is Revision 2 and 3.
The G3 is notoriously difficult to install NetBSD on, and I think Linux
has some similar problems varying with distribution. OS X Jaguar is your
best bet for Unix. Despite this, it is a very nice machine for the
generation.
--
--------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ ---
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Well done is better than well said. -- Benjamin Franklin -------------------