On 14 Dec 2005, at 22:45, Rob Rait wrote:
I've just acquired a B/W G3 450 with 704Mb RAM running OS 9.0.4. It's
my first Mac (after years of PC ownership and working with them from
9-5) so please be gentle with me...
Is it worth investigating the possibility of installing OS 10.4 on
this machine, or will that be too much for the processor?
My advice is invest in a cheap copy of OS X 10.3 (Panther NOT Tiger).
Should be able to grab one for less than half the price of Tiger.
10.3 runs faster and has most of the useful features 10.4 does and
less annoying eye candy (read - Dashboard). In the long term OS X is
nicer if you have a G4. CPU upgrades aren't too hard to find and give
a really boost, especially with that much RAM. I run a G4/500 with
768MB of RAM on my B&W and it runs admirably in 10.3.9. You could
also look at getting a Radeon 7000 PCI graphics card (it MUST be a
Mac version) - they are noticeably faster overall than the Rage128
card the computer shipped with.
If so, is there an idiot's guide on the net anywhere about how to
go about it
(so I can read up before making any comittment financially), as my
machine has 3 discs, 1* 20Gb ATA partitioned into 2 10-ish Gb
partitions and 2* 8.5 Gb SCSI discs and my gut instinct (from my PC
experience) would be to install the OS on one of the SCSI discs,
rather than on the first IDE partition (as OS9 currently is), as the
SCSI ones should be faster.
Depends what SCSI card it's using. If it's a 50-pin (conventional
ribbon type connectors like IDE only wider) then it's probably not
gonna get you much extra performance headroom, aside from the usual
CPU relief SCSI brings. A 50-pin card is likely to actually have a
lower transfer rate than the ATA33 IDE. Also OS X is a bit fussy
about some SCSI cards and booting. I tried to use a 68-pin ACARD
SCSI card in mine and it wouldn't boot OS X. Boots 9.1 fine, but not
OS X. Odd, but not totally unexpected.
My advice is buy a brand new 7200rpm IDE drive with a big cache (8MB
is the norm these days) and use that. Mine has a Seagate Barracuda
7200.8 80GB in it and it is good and fast and astonishingly quiet.
HOWEVER (sorry to shout but this is vital) before throwing any IDE
disks at it you need to read this:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3-ZONE/yosemite/newfeatures.html
to see if you have a Rev. 2 B&W. The IDE controller part number is
critical. The Rev. 1 controller physically destroys slave disks (I
used to have a Rev. 1 and it ate 2.5GB off the end of one of my
drives) and the damage to the drive is unrecoverable, unless you can
get hold of the manufacturer's low level formatter for that drive
(not easy).
I've read somewhere that for OS10 to install on a G3 it has to be
installed on a disc/partition of 8Gb or less. Is this correct? Would
installing it onto an 8.5 Gb disc fail?
That only applies to Beige G3s. B&W G3s use the 'New World' ROM and a
later IDE controller, the combination of which is free from that
restriction. I have done maybe 10 installs on 2 B&W G3s on larger
than 8GB partitions and never had an issue. I usually allot 15GB at
least for OS X partitions.
I can't seem to find anything that will (re)partition a disc, does OS9
provide anything natively?
If you can boot from an installer CD (or another hard disk from the
one you want to partition, which is pretty easy in your case) you can
use 'Drive Setup'. This is the native OS9 tool. The OS X installer CD
has a Disk Utility on for doing the same during the OS X install so
it's not that big an issue if you just want to partition for OS X.
I'm finding my way around the filesystem and the (to me) weird
keyboard combinations etc relatively quickly and could get used to
OS9, but as I have had some past experiences with Unix at work, OS10
appeals, even if some of the more esoteric bells and whistles appear
to be more eye-candy that useful.
OS X 10.4 is really the only version that suffers from that. 10.3 is
much leaner,and as a result faster.
Failing that, I may have a look at
Linux on the Mac. Ubuntu do a live CD ( i.e. run Linux from the CD
ROM) version that's compatible with the G3, so I can have a look and
see whow it looks without necessarily b*ggering up the machine.
Linux on a Mac... ugughghghghghgh. I tired that once. Never again.
If you are really serious then Yellow Dog Linux is the most compatible.
Final question (for now...). I've managed to lock the machine up a
couple of times by my own stupidity. Is there a way of breaking out of
something that's just showing the 'busy' cursor other than hitting the
reset knob on the front of the system box?
Try Apple-Alt-Escape (Command-Option-Escape in Mac language). That
sometimes allows you to Force Quit the offending app. It's not that
great in OS 9 becuase the multitasking is not pre-emptive or
multithreaded, so generally a crashed process crashes the system. If
you manage to Force Quit then generally it's ok, but if it fails then
it's a reset. Oh and don't use the Reset Button unless you absolutely
have to. If you have the original G3 keyboard (same colour as the
Mac) it has a Power button on it at the top-right. Hold Apple
(Command)-Crtl and stab the power key and it should reset.
All in all, I'm pretty impressed with the Mac, but I knew I would be.
Wait 'til you try OS X. It'll blow your socks off.
--
Mark Benson
My Blog:
<http://mdblog.68kmac.org>
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<http://www.68kmac.org>
Visit my Homepage: <http://homepage.mac.com/markbenson>
"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."
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