The G4 500 has not been that cheap until very recent months. $150 won't make it more than the sows ear; The beige has to have a video card and ATA card to make it even a shadow of the B&W. It does not have firewire or even USB. The beige is often flaky when subjected to upgrades; stability varies greatly from one box to the next with or without upgrades. The beige has been a useful Mac but was never as trustworthy as the PCI boxes or the B&W and the other towers that followed. It is much easier to install OSX on the old PCI Macs than the beige; I doubt there is much more than half of them that will install 10.3 even using XPF.
As you point out, even now the processor alone is $150 and it makes a $200 B&W box a steal (you can really get the B&Ws for $70/$130). Spend the money on something that will run your software. Use the beige as a PS print server and it will save you the money of upgrading your very expensive PS software to OSX. They are also good to run SCSI scanners in OS9.
If you must use it, I think the best road for the beige is a $60 G3 450 or 500 zif. Maybe a used ATA66 so you can use a good drive. Save the money for another mac.
Roger Harris
On May 11, 2005, at 8:39 PM, Peter da Silva wrote:
Do not spend more upgrading than the computer is worth at the present time.
Hmmm.
I think that's a bit simplistic. If you have a computer worth $50 and you can upgrade it for $150, or you can spend $300 on a new computer, you're better off with the upgrade.
Until fairly recently that's the situation we were in with Beige G3s. A B&W G3/300 would set you back $300 (and a Sawtooth G4 was even more), but a G4/500 ZIF for your G3 would cost $150.
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