Ernie,
Not to put a damper on this rebuilding project, but if
you're friend wants to put all that money into making
a S900 a desktop publishing platform, then he's just
tossing money away.
I have a S900 with all the specs that you're looking
into, and the performance is adequate for home use,
but not for serious DTP.
The reason why I continue to put money into it is that
I'm so far down the road that spending a $100 here and
there gets me into the world of OSX without having to
shell out $3000 for what I really would like to have.
Again, i have a S900 / 1Gig of ram / DVD Drive / ATI
7000 / Sonnet G3 400 mhz.
>From what i'm reading, you're about to embark on a
trip to get that S900 up to where I'm at. Well, I can
tell you it's not going to be worth it.
At work, i have a nice Dual G4 1Gig, with that, i can
run InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, Word,
Excel, Mail, an FTP, Dreamweaver, Suitcase, Acrobat,
Firefox, TextEdit, iTunes, and Limewire all at the
same time. the machine is incredibly responsive and
fast.
Yes, I use all those and i think for most designers,
that covers about all the tools they'll use daily. I
try and keep open programs to a minimum, but by 11am,
i'm already have all those programs running, why i
don't set it to auto launch i don't know.
Anways, my S900 can run all those programs, but it
takes a great deal of patience to wait for loading up
and such. Often times, i'll fall asleep waiting. no
kidding. try opening 20 folders in icon view. Watch
the Finder's memory use climb from 7mb to over 200mb.
at that point the finder gets really bogged down.
My view is that if you have an S900 halfway modified,
it's certainly cheaper than buying brand new, but in
your case, if you have a stock machine, then it's just
tossing money to get a Mac that doesn't perform well
enough in a professional environment. If you want to
do this as a hobby for enjoyment, then i'd go for the
$220 Powerlogix G3 1gighz
$120 ATI 9200
$80 DVD drive
$128 max ram
$200 two ATA hard drives.
$ 70 ATA card
well, that'll put you down almost $820 without tax
and shipping. not to mention usb / firewire card. etc.
and you're still looking at a bastardized mac with all
the issues of future NON-compatibility and such. yeah,
ryan is great but how long can he wage the war?
All in all, the s900 is a great machine and can run
even Tiger, but real world performance will have you
screaming for speed, speed, speed. and the s900, all
moderately decked out, doesn't have that speed. It'll
get the work done, but at a price.
Final : also web browsing is really slow on my
machine. perhaps it's because I have two monitors
hooked up to the one ati7000 card. heck i don't know
anymore, i just do other things while the page
refreshes.
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