Emma65

Got my mom a G4 powermac in august. Today I brought home a G3 tower. Loads of bits and pieces to it as well.

Now I'm thinking what to do with it.

Rip it apart and use it for spares? Mom's could do with more RAM. Possibly even use the HDD? What about the CD drive.

The thing also came with an external HDD and a zipdrive and loads of other bits. I briefly opened it and the inside is very dirty so it does need a good clean.

If it would be working, how about using it as an entertainment machine - a very large stationary ipod, so to speak? Stick it as a file server in the family? Would I be able to load it with leopard? *ducking* I have a 10.3 disk sloshing about somewhere.

Keyboard was surprisingly new. Not the see-through with black keys but the white one that was just recently replaced by the new flat keyboard.

A whole shopping bag and manuals for various software was included. Adobe, Corel.... crikes I have no idea, really. It's in the boot of my car at the moment. Maybe I should bring it in. It will be below 0 tonight.

Right, I'm off to sleep. I'll check in the morning if anyone has suggestions what to do with the thing.

'night all!

/E

uncertaintraveler

Portions of the post that previously appeared in this space have been deleted. I would provide you with a reason why, but doing so would likely be against the TOS.

Efrem

'Fraid not. Leopard requires G4 (867 MHz or faster), G5, or Intel. It also requires more RAM than this probably has.

Speaking of RAM, it's unlikely that a G3 tower uses the same RAM as your mom's more recent G4. Check the specs on both before you plan on using the RAM from here that way. (www.everymac.com should have the info you need.) RAM is cheap these days anyhow.

dtsm

Tiger might run on the G3 albeit sluggish (even with more RAM) - I'm still using panther on my g3 iBook. Do you really need Leopard - what specifically for?

And yes, bring it out of the cold tonight

brosnan6

Since it's a mac there's really only one thing to do with it....get rid of it

mikel51

From the title, I thought that this thread would be about which model gulfstream jet you and your mother acquired.

kanebear

That was my first thought; media server. Stuff it full of disk space and use it to stream music and videos as well as for file repository duty and perhaps bit-torrent use.

graraps

Agreed. Would it be possible to install Linux on a mac? Now that'd be fun!

Efrem

Piece of cake, nothing odd about it. Parallels Desktop even lets you run Linux and Mac OS at the same time, though that loses the ability of bare Linux to run on what would otherwise be obsolete hardware - an important advantage in some situations, such as the one that started this thread.

aa4ever

If it's the G3 tower that's blue and decent looking (like the G4 towers), i've used them seen as surprisingly good doorstops.

Old eMacs can also serve this purpose, but they're harder to use since they're rounded!

RichMSN

I have a G3 iBook, 600MHz, 768MB RAM that runs surprisingly well under Tiger (10.4). The Leopard disk does an architecture check and will not allow for the install. On the web there are instructions on how to work around this, but I haven't bothered.

It's my knock around in the basement while I'm working on my crappy Windows laptop machine. My main home machine is a 2.4GHz Intel iMac with 4GB RAM that is the best machine I've ever owned, which I use 99% of the time when I'm not working on something requiring my company's software, which only runs on Windows.

And anyone who says, "It's a Mac, get rid of it" has never used one, at least not recently.

CrazyOne

I have a couple of those blue G3 towers hanging around here. I did set one up as a test server a while back with 10.3 on it, but more recently it's been off and collecting dust.

The G3s are slightly less useful than the G4s. The internal ATA bus can be flaky (and it's slow). But it will run 10.3 okay (and probably 10.4 okay, just have never personally done that on a G3 of any type) if you can get enough RAM into it, at least 512MB ideally.

Unless the G4 is a really early one, the RAM won't be the same on the two machines, and the HD in the G3 is probably a slower one unless it has been upgraded. It'll do a few things, but you don't want to put it into a situation where you have to be waiting on it a lot. It is capable of running iTunes, sure, or just being what amounts to a network attached disk for file sharing if you like.

Efrem

Based on the smileys in the referenced post, I suspect it was more of a comment on the frequent "If it runs Windows, get rid of it and get a Mac" posts here than a real suggestion.

That said, I have to agree that when I hear this said seriously, it usually says more about the person who says it than it does about the merits of either product.

RichMSN

Whoops. Missed the smileys. I'll blame my lack of coffee and trying to pay attention to a conference call for my lack of attention.

drummingcraig

I have a similar tower, but its an early G4 (400MHz). Its been sitting collecting dust for a couple years now and I have been trying to decide what to do with it. Optical drives and HD's are insanely cheap for these machines, as are processor upgrades. Depending on which model G3 you have Emma, you could upgrade the processor for as little as $150-300 US.

The media server is probably a good idea as you could stuff a couple of large HD's in it very cheaply.