I finally bought a Mac OS X machine!

It's the computer I dreamed about getting five years ago - The blue and white powermac G3. 350 MHz, 384MB Ram. Whopping 6GB hard drive. First mac to have firewire.

Only $200 (shipped!) off ebay. Not a bad deal.

It's a pretty slow, old machine, but it still has plenty of life left in it. I use one at a side job that's almost identical, running os x 10.3, and it runs just fine for normal tasks. I can be editing code, have multiple safari tabs open, stream AAR, and it never seems to bog. Heck, I should even be able to manage a little editing in iMovie (I've seen Final Cut pro on an old g3 too, but it struggles).

I used to be a huge Mac geek (and Apple II before that - my folks are educators), but I haven't had a new mac since my old powerbook 1400. When I started my computer sci degree I moved to Linux on Intel because everything we did was UNIX.

Well, Mac OS X *is* UNIX. And it rules. And, since I'm a freelance tech, I need to know how to work all the operating systems.

I sent the money order off today (I know what you're thinking, but I checked out the guys feedback and everything looks like he's a legit small computer shop in Washington state who was sick of people bouncing checks). Now I'll just be waiting the week or two in anticipation until my new old machine finally gets here!

I'm running OS-10.2 and am just getting used to it....I have 20G Hard Drive partitioned 8 and 12 for OS-10 and Mac Classic...I've also got a much faster PC that I bought this Christmas and am using both networked via wired router.

I've had a few problems with my computer quitting, for no reason and am having my Mac Tech who just installed a new motherboard and new hard drive, my old one died, to see what is happening.

Let me know how yours comes out...

that's still a pretty good machine. slower bus isaboutall. but I had to go for the blue one cuz it supports 10.3 (i've heard you can use xpostfacto to get it on the beige g3, but I don't want to mess with it).

I used it on a G3 350 iMac with 390 Megs of RAM. It works but expect to wait 5-10 minutes to render a title slide or add a text overlay, and abut 2 hours to render a 3 minute movie. My wife has the same tower. It's a rock solid machine.

Still, welcome to the Mac OS Club :)

With eMacs running 1.25 gig G4s starting at $799 now is a great time to get into the Mac OS.

but that has to wait until I have a bit more free cash. I could afford the g3 NOW

thanks for the tip about imovie. i'm going to keep my eyes open for a cheap g4 chip. I think i can pop one up to 500mhz in there. altivec would be nice for the video, yes.

I only wish that the g3 had an agp bus so I could use quartz extreme. i saw something on the web about a hack to use a newer ati pci card, but apparently it saturates the entire pci bus and makes anything else using the bus choke.

that's okay. I don't need that fast of a computer. I spend most of my time in the terminal anyway.

but it does choke the bus and offers only VERY LIMITED performance enhancement. I have an ATI Radeon 7000 32 meg PCI installed in the wife's machine. I haven't used the hack as it tend to render regular stuff just fine without it.