Thanks for all that information. Now I know that it was just as well I didn't get the keyboard plugged in yet. If I'd gone through all that I would have definitely given up by now and junked it. All the Configuration frustrations I went through with PCs and Microsoft baloney burnt out that part of me that used to be capable of enduring megahours of configuration hell. Just can't do that anymore. You've given me some food for thought.
On Oct 25, 7:27 am, Kris Tilford <[email protected]> wrote: > On Oct 25, 2009, at 4:29 AM, Joss wrote: > > > Please HELP!!! > > The Beige PowerMac G3 is still useable, but probably a little too slow > and too expensive to upgrade to make the effort worthwhile. It's one > of the toughest, with a lot of small quirks related to power supply, > voltage regulator, personality cards, video, ROMs, motherboard > revisions, and all combinations thereof. > > Then, on top of this, there is the 1st 8GB partition limitation; the > need to use XPostFacto to advance the OS beyond 10.2.8 to a more > useable 10.4.11 or even 10.5.8; the cost of an upgraded CPU, video > card, HD, and RAM to make this fast enough to a least play video > smoothly. > > All in all, it's a great "project" Mac, but not a great "everyday" > Mac. Any AGP PowerMac G4 will run circles around this old Mac. The > cost of upgrading this will give you an expensive and slow Mac in > comparison the what you might get in a newer model for the same money. > I'm not sure where the "sweet spot" is right now for power & speed vs. > cost, but I suspect it may be up at the MDD (mirror drive door) G4 or > even the Mini G4 or early G5? The other sweet spot is the Intel > hackintosh Mac made from cheap PC components. > > I'd think a Beige would need a pretty good size HD, at least 512MB > RAM, a Radeon PCI card, and some other various hardware upgrades (USB > 2, Firewire, CPU upgrade?) to work passably well. > > Your big problem is the keyboard. You MUST have an ADB keyboard to use > this Mac because USB initializes too late for any keyboard commands to > work, so this means as a USB keyboard only setup you'd have NO startup > keyboard commands available, which means pretty much a disaster. ABD > keyboards should be cheap or free, GET ONE before doing anything or > else you'll be stuck in a terrible bind. If you have 256MB you may be > able to proceed with installing OS X, but like all OS X, more RAM is > better, more HD space is better, faster video card and CPU is better. > If you don't have these things, they cost money, and I think this > money is better spent on a newer used Mac at this point in time. > > Good luck! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
