On 8 Nov 2004, at 14:32, Laurent Daudelin wrote:
If you could upgrade the processor for the 300MHz for cheap, then I think it
would be worth it, but I'm not sure buying a brand new G4 upgrades is. You
are still left with a sub-par video system that can't be upgraded and a
relatively slow system bus. For a few hundred dollars than what you would
pay for a G4 upgrade, you could probably find a faster iBook that will more
easily support OS X.
Unless there's any sentimental attachment to the machine, Laurent's advice is very sound. A 500MHz G4 upgrade, the fastest available for the Wallstreet, will cost you upwards of $300 -- and it still won't enable you to run OS X particularly well. Add to that the cost of upgrading the RAM (256MB is about the minimum), and you're already more than a third of the way towards getting a brand-new iBook, with wireless networking, a processor more than twice as fast, probably 5-8 times the hard disk space, a vastly better video card, and full support for current and future versions of OS X. Even an older iBook, say 500-700MHz, would be much faster in OS X than an upgraded Wallstreet -- and probably wouldn't cost much more than $350, either.
That said, a Wallstreet can be a worthwhile OS X machine for some purposes (mainly office applications like e-mail, web browsing, word processing, and so forth). The 266MHz processor is fine, and as long as you've got at least 256MB RAM (and a hard drive large enough to store OS X -- about 1GB plus 1GB or so for swapfiles and temporary usage -- and your applications and documents), you should be set. A 300MHz processor card goes for twice as much as a 266MHz on eBay, so it's probably not really worth it for the hypothetical 10% speed boost. Note also that most 266MHz cards can be overclocked to at least 300MHz without much effort, although there is some soldering required.
Cheers, Ben
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