--- On Sat, 2/27/10, Austin Leeds <[email protected]> wrote: <clip> > Anybody know what's the coolest stuff these things can do?
Run Linux? ;) Well the answer for the Duo 230 is not much. It's slow, has a monochrome, 640x480 screen, a small hard drive and little RAM. 500 meg was the largest 2.5" SCSI hard drive, huge for a Mac of that vintage, more likely the Duo has somewhere around 40 meg. There's been some bigger SCSI drives for PowerBooks, but they're IDE drives with a very small SCSI to IDE bridge attached, they don't fit all PowerBooks due to the extra length. Get Word Perfect 3.5e on the Duo and it'll work for word processing. (But not WYSIWYG HTML, WP 3.5e is horrible at it.) The PowerMacs are capable of running Mac OS 9.1*, 9.2.2 if you use OS9 Helper, though there's not much point in going past 9.1 with a NuBus PowerMac. Apple removed support for NuBus past 9.1, OS9 Helper extracts the pieces from 9.1 and patches it into the later updates. *The Pre-G3 PowerMacs must be booted from a RETAIL OS 9.0 or 9.1 CD in order to install it. Some of the OS 9.x CDs shipped with later PowerMacs won't boot the older models. PowerMacs with a G3 or later CPU can run OS X. 10.2.x it the last version that'll install on a Beige G3 or G3 AIO, without using X Post Facto. The Beige Macs get *really slow* with 10.3 and up unless you install a CPU upgrade and a PCI videocard that's has full acceleration support from OS X. Then they're still held back by the 66Mhz bus speed and RAM. Any CPU or CPU upgrade that uses a bus speed slower than 66Mhz is bad for overall performance on those. The jumpers can be set for a little faster bus speed, but to be stable it needs PC100 RAM or PC133. Not all PC133 RAM is backwards compatible with slower speeds. For web browsing on OS 9 your only somewhat up to date options are Classilla http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ or iCab http://www.icab.de/dl.php Clasilla is an unfinished work in progress. iCab 3.0.5 for 'classic' Mac OS was released in 2008, looks like they're finally abandoning pre-OS X systems. Microsoft Office 2001 for Macintosh was the final version for OS 9.x, and there's still compatibility between it and newer versions, if files are saved from the newer versions to work with previous Office releases. For the most part you're looking at software getting on towards 10+ years old. So think of what you did with computers a decade and more ago and that's mostly what you can do with Ye Olde Macintosh. -- ----- You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/
