Well I'm still here...:-) I was running 10.2.4 on a 8500/Sonnet G3/400 and then a Rev b Beige G3/300 overclocked to 333. Subjectively, the Beige G3 was a huge improvement over the 8500, even with a crappy old - and I mean crappy, and old (sub even the 4GB Quantums that used to come with the 233's) - ATA drive (the only drive I had spare under 8GB - I had far too much un-backed-up data to partition a decent drive)
Problems with the Beige G3 - stupid 8GB limit for OS X installation (a limitation of the ATA controller) A long start-up time. I dropped a G4/450 ZIF I there and the start-up delay was sooooo loooong I thought the install had failed. I wiped and repeated, same thing. It was only because I was making dinner, and left the machine on (for about 20 minutes) it was able to complete its boot, and I realised that 20 minutes was the norm for the Beige G4/450 (admittedly, after this first boot, it subsequently didn't take so long - about 5-10 minutes, but still exasperating after a 'Restart Required' software update, when you realise how long a wait you're in for. Once booted, it was acceptably fast - not too far from a G4/400 Sawtooth I used to have. I dropped a 256MB PC133 DIMM in there, and then afterwards read about problems some people had with PC133's. I was just lucky.... The beige with a G4/450 felt fast enough for me to consider it more than a stopgap, but as a general purpose day to day work-horse. I had no problems seeing a slave drive, or with the SCSI bus on this machine. In fact, I was deeply surprised to find the same SCSI drive (and install) from the 8500 booted the Beige just fine... Obviously SCSI drives don't suffer the 8GN partition limit in the Beige, but the SCSI is slow (5MB/s) so you wouldn't want to be tied to it for your main boot disk by choice. I then added up the cost of these items: Beige G3 minitower/300-333, 8500, Sonnet G3/400, XLR8 G4/450, and realised if I put this on eBay I could approach the price of a secondhand G4 proper, and this is what I did. I now have a G4/533 DP which is without any doubt the best experience I've had with Nac OS X. Very fluid and responsive. Much better than a G4/800 iMac or my old G4/733 Digital Audio, despite the fact the 533 DP was positioned below the 733... maybe it just suits the way I works (heavy multi-tasking...) Problems with the 8500/400 none, really, apart from (understandably) poor graphics performance. A Radeon 7000 PCI probably would have helped here, but again, it's easy to spend too much on the sum of the bits compared with a whole new machine... -- Unsupported OS X is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Unsupported OS X list info <http://lowendmac.com/lists/unsupported.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive <http://www.mail-archive.com/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
