My second Mac

My experience with the Beige G3 is that the stock hard drives are slow as molasses. The built-in IDE bus is only 16.7 MB/s (whichever ATA that is) but the hard drive doesn't even perform up to that level--at least mine did not. Once I installed a more modern hard drive (faster media rate, i.e. faster data from platters to heads) the machine showed a marked improvement in performance. Beyond that, you can easily spend more upgrading than a faster newer machine would cost you on the used market. That said... A faster IDE card would improve things as well. Acard makes a very nice two channel ATA-133 card however, it will set you back about twice what you paid for the machine. Some years ago VST Tech sold an ATA-66 card based on the Promise UltraTek 66 card. If you move three or four SM resistors, possibly pull the half-size metal can oscillator (there are different versions of the UT66 and some have the Osc. and others don't) and desolder and reprogram the Winbond Flash chip, you can convert a cheap (<$5) Promise UltraTek66 into a VST UltraTek66. If you care, I'll try to hunt up the conversion instructions. The Promise cards were apparently OEM in DELL machines or some such, so there are a bunch of them on the used market. The bus speed and bus-CPU multiplier are controlled by a jumper block on the front left of the motherboard. You can change the bus speed of the Beige G3s won't operate at 83 MHz and tests show that this doesn't really make a big difference in performance. The 300 MHz CPU can often be run at around 366 MHz, so you can speed your CPU a bit by changing the bus-CPU ratio. Many folks have done this reliably, but my experience was that it caused problems after a while. CPU replacements up to 1.1 GHz are also available but the manufacturer's (PowerLogix) retail outlet (OWC, macsales.com) seems to be out of them. See above about spending more money than a newer used computer would cost... There's a gap in speeds between 500 MHz and 900 MHz having to do with the version history of the PPC750. The machine used PC66 SDRAM but PC100 or PC133 will also work. DIMM capacities up to 256 MB are supported but some addressing modes are not. So you need (I think) 16 chip DIMMs on the 256 MB capacity. IIRC eight chip 256 MB DIMMs will not work or will only be seen as 128 MB. 512 MB DIMMs won't work because of limitations of the Motorola/Freescale MPC106 memory/PCI controller/bridge. For the things where my memory is hazy (indicated by a ? or "I think") check the articles on G3 computers at xlr8yourmac.com. Also, there's a link from the FAQ there to the jumper settings for the Beige G3 motherboard clock and ratio settings. Mac DB15 to VGA adapters are common and cheap (=<$4, I sell a multi-rez model for $4 shipped in USA). If the monitor will work with a VGA output, it should be possible to make it work on the built-in video of the Beige G3. However, the Beige G3 and earlier Macs rely on sense codes in the monitor cable to indicate what resolutions are supported. When an adapter is used the sense codes are provided by the adapter. Some adapters are fixed-resolution coded so it's tough to get anything but the adapter's fixed resolution out of the Mac if you use a fixed resolution adapter. Other adapters are "universal" and have DIP switches to support many resolutions, and one of the resolution code choices is "21" multi-resolution". Jeff Walther