[muglo] Re: OS X running on mac clone
- From: "Eric D." <hideme666@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 23:05:17 -0500
on 25/2/03 9:41 PM, Alex at admeddemda@xxxxxx wrote:
> A beige G3??? Why would I want one? 3 measly ram slots (168 pin dimms
> so by your calculations about ram needed for X, a beige G3 couldnt
> even run it!). 3 pci slots... and room for what? one cd drive and 2
> hard drives?
I guess that's the trade off. If you have lots of PCI cards & drives to put
in the machine then you need the room. The Beige can go up to 768 MB of RAM
which for most use is more than enough in OS X (I find 0.5 GB enough except
on the worst of days, and even then it's not that bad once the OS gets rid
of the redundant crap from memory).
> My tower has 8 ram slots and maxes out at 1 gig of ram. It has 8
> total drive bays, 4 large bays and 4 small bays. And 6 pci slots....
If only you could modify a G3 or G4 mobo to put in that case...
> I've never understood the attraction to the beige G3... IMO it's a
> very limited machine... and it still sells for far more than a G3
> upgraded older pci mac... which is just dumb.
It has a few advantages over the PCI Macs: 66 MHz bus (that's 15-25 MHz
(30-50%) faster than the old ones), takes (cheaper) PC66/100/133 RAM, has
better built-in video (acceleration now supported by OS X) and is actively
supported by Apple in OS X (and, I'm sure you'll find that makes a
difference... PS spring for Jaguar, it's a significant improvement over
previous OS X versions. I've now been running OS X 10.2.4 for over a week
and a half without kernel panics (had three when I first installed 10.2.4
but they were related to dial-up internet and after fiddling with the
settings they've gone away)). 10.2.4 really is the first nearly-final
quality release of OS X, and hands down more stable than OS 9 (I would never
have been able to run OS 9 for a week and half up-time without a three
finger salute at least once/day (it's a laptop which is why I leave it on)).
I bet that 10.2.5 will have got rid of the last of the dumb, silly, easily
fixable bugs, and that'll be the first *true* perfect release (quite a bit
better than OS 9.2.2).
Although, in OS 9.2.2's defence: my girlfriend's Lombard/333 (PB Bronze
keyboard, 96 MB) also is on or sleeping for weeks on end and is *relatively*
stable (of course, she throws a lot less at her machine (Outlook Express
5.0.6, IE 5.1.6, Word 2001, Eric's Solitaire Sampler and FirstClass) than I
do mine (usually three browsers (Chimera, Safari, and one of Netscrape
(Classic) or IE (X)) open at the same time, Outlook Express/Entourage
(Classic), Word X, Excel X, Terminal.app, GC, and sometime Virtual PC...
and, yes, I haven't had to do a three-finger salute with all that being
thrown at my machine). We probably only have to restart her Lombard twice a
week to deal with some instability (dial-up just ain't well implemented on
Mac) and give the machine a three finger salute once every two weeks.
The cool thing about OS X is that even when dial-up goes flaky it cleans up
without a restart required (at first I assumed that would be the way to
clean it up since that's what you have to do in OS 9, but I found that the
problem simply went away when I reconnected -- no restart required). There's
a problem where it'll say disconnecting, disconnecting, etc, the modem will
be connected to the ISP, but TCP/IP is down. The only way to deal with it is
to disconnect the modem from the line and then the OS realises the
connection has been cut. Afterwards I can just dial-up again, no loss of
TCP/IP functionality.
But, yeah, I've never been fond of the Beige G3s myself either. They were an
experiment in going to the G3 family of CPUs so a lot of the bugs didn't get
worked out until the B&W -- they were G3 but they had none of the advantages
that come with newer machines (IDE, FireWire, USB built-in, 100 BaseT
ethernet).
> The blue and white G3 is a nice machine... for sure... but I have a
> lot of scsi devices and serial devices that I like... and I know I
> could put a scsi card and serial card in a B&W, and I did consider
> it... but total cost would have been more than what I've put into the
> tower clone. And besides, I like the challenge of putting X on an
> older mac.
Time to get rid of the serial devices and SCSI, well, it's pretty defunct
now except for speciality uses (&, I guess if you're one of those speciality
users then you'll get a high-performance SCSI card anyway ;)
> Maybe in a couple years when the B&W's are cheap, I'll get one....
I bet your next machine will be one of the G4s instead (unless you get a B&W
soon).
Prices for B&Ws are dropping through the floor though. By the end of the
year you should be able to pick up a bare-bones B&W G3/300 64/4GB/24X
CD-ROM/16 MB video for <$300 CDN I think.
L8r, Eric.
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