On Thursday, Jan 2, 2003, at 21:13 Europe/London, Marten van de Kraats wrote:
I fully agree with Marten there. Apple's miniaturization has been astounding. Even the G4 has stayed at Midi-Tower size while PCs have grown into mammoth expanses of Metal and fans and *stupid stupid stupid* (sorry I think they are so pointless) blue lamps all over everywhere in an effort to cover up the fact that despite spending �150 on the case it still isn't as nice as a G4 :DAnd so was the Cube and in some way the iMac (old and new)... Maybe PC's as a whole have come too large as of late, Macs did not.
That's no problem most G3/G4 powered Takky Conversions have PCI Radeon or Rage 128 cards running an external display in addition to the onboard video running a 640x480 (or now even 800x600 although I question how good that could look on that tiny 10" tube and also wether it severely shortens the life of the tube) internally. Onto that you can add a big @$$ CRT or, it you have really mad aspirations for your Classic Mac, a DVI Flat panel (using a Radeon 7000). Going completely OTT you can EVEN plug it into the TV, or another monitor (presuming you use a Radeon as they support Dual Screens), AS WELL as the internal and the external video. You are really not limited for screen area on a good G3/G4 powered Compact Mac, you just have to do the job right.However, with larger displays being the norm now, that's going to be harder to do.
I am a web-master/designer by trade and still design all my pages for use (although it looks a bit cramped it still works) on an 800x600 screen. All my Mac pages work on anything from 512x38x upwards. I have a 19" monitor on my machine at work, it's not a very nice one either, it's refresh (not the refresh rate, the refresh characteristic on the phosphors) running at 1280x960 and it's WAAYYY to much for web browsing.Though I question the need of a 21" display to send email
and web surf with, and I'm on the net a lot more than the average person.
Mini ITX isn't 'new new new', it;'s been around a couple of years. I think if your gonna build a PC you should do it properly, Mini ITX boards have slow CPUs (750-1000MHz tops) because of the heat/ventilation factor. This makes 'em good if you want a little cube PC you can tote around with a lightweight(ish) 12" flat panel but then you may as well buy a mid-range laptop, they are no more crippled (maybe apart from lack of PCI but most don't need it as they have PCMCIA Cardbus) and usually a lot faster (mid range is coming in at 1.6GHz typically now). The things people poke them in (would you believe one guy put an 800MHz PC ITX board in a G4 Cube case??? YYUUCCKK) make me throw up too. I mean I like people with imagination but a PC Toaster is just the stupidest thing on earth, plus it doesn't toast very fast!The new mini-ITX boards harken back to that same idea to some extent.
Nope, sorry, in my book the only proper desktop PC uses ATX and a good sized (although not gargantuan) case, allowing a top class 2GHz+ processor and a phat 128MB graphics card, it's pointless having a desktop PC at all otherwise. I know many ppl here don't see the point in having PCs at all but I'm a game hacker (note that's hacker NOT cracker), I have been and will long be for years to come (as long as it's possible). I can't do jack with a console game, I can take some PC games and totally rebuild them :).
Yup.... as we drift back on topic :). Sorry, had to get that lot off my chest :).Some people did pretty neat work with color classics... Even upgrading them to G3's or G4's.
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