Beige G3 Resurrection Project

jgardner asks: "I have been a Mac user since '84, and lust for the latest hardware with the best of them. However, my bank account is less than accommodating. My current machine is a Beige G3 266. I use it for Quark & Photoshop work, and would like to move to Jaguar if the performance hit isn't too great. Does anyone have advice and/or experience that will help me save a few bucks and avoid any potential pitfalls?"

Not much hope

Fill 'er up with RAM. If you buy any other upgrade, you're half way to a new eMac.

Buy Something

You sound like my dad who doesn't want to give up his 486/100, or his 86' Imperial, or 75 Sear 19" console TV. Really, the time and effort, and certain headaches you will get, is not worth it. Go get an G4. Plus, you want to upgrade your OS but you think your high end software will run on it? You gonna run it under Classic and think it will run better? Why? You will have to pay a ton to upgrade the software so just upgrade the HW at the same time. The world turns and at some point you have to turn with it.

Re: Why bother?

would like to move to Jaguar if the performance hit isn't too great

Seriously, why do you need to use OS X at all? What does it provide you that you can't get in Mac OS 9 currently that you absolutely need? I would seriously sit down and think about that one. Then, I would add up how much it'll cost you to upgrade you Mac to use OS X. Don't forget to include: hardware you'll absolutely need to buy, Mac OS X itself, native versions of QuarkXPress and Photoshop and anything else you might want, and the time you're going to use up upgrading your system and trying to get it to work with Mac OS X.

IMHO, the price is just too high unless you can simply buy a new computer, especially with the time you'll need to put into it.

What's the maximum RAM for your machine?

The biggest problem I see (and I became a Mac user in 2001, so beige Apple boxes make me think of the Apple IIe) is how much OS X needs RAM. 512MB minimum. Really.

Not saying it's impossible, but how would you benefit by running Jaguar? You'd be running slower, you'd have to upgrade your software--I mean you're not going to slow down your system by installing Jaguar just to run Photoshop under Classic are you? Kind of defeats the purpose. Upgrades for Photoshop and Quark alone will run you $400 (don't remember how much Quark is, but PS upgrades are typically $200), not to mention whatever other software you use day-to-day. And the $100 or so for Jaguar. That's $500 there. You can buy a used iMac for that much and be a lot happier even if you're running your current programs in Classic (but this time on a machine that's able to handle Jaguar in the first place).

At any rate, you're better off asking this question on a Mac site. Mac OS X FAQ at http://www.macosxfaq.com is a good place to start. Best of luck if you try it, but I wouldn't bother. Especially if you want to get any work done.

Re:What's the maximum RAM for your machine?

Check the revision of the logic board. If it's a rev 1 you can only put 384MB in. The slots only recognise 128MB even if you put a 256MB stick in them. Rev. 1: $77D.40F2 Rev. 2: $77D.45F1 Rev. 3: $77D.45F2 Look in the System Profiler. If you're rev 2 or better you can put in 768MB.

Save your time

The best advice I can give you is to throw your G3 266 in the nearest dumpster.

Mac OS X has trouble running on some of the older iMac's which came out after the PowerMac G3 your talking about. MacOS X simply doesn't have the hardware drivers for the older Mac's, and since Apple does both software AND hardware, it's unlikely that you'll find any third party drivers you can get your hands on.

You can get a good iBook, or eMac for under $1,000 these days if you're looking for something with OS X, I'd go with a G4 though. The G3's are slowly being phased out completely. I'm pretty sure that what ever version of OS X that comes after Panther won't even support most G3's.

Keep in mind that it has always been the pratice of Apple to 'encourage' you to get the latest hardware by making the latest OS require it.

Re:Save your time

Well, I disagree with the parent to your post on a few points, too, but you need to double-check your stuff first, too:

Also Panther, X.3, has better support for the older Macs.

Read: I've never actually done research on this, but if I use a gimmicky narrative, I'll sound accurate.

As a matter of fact [216.239.53.104], current developer seeds of Panther aren't supported on Macs that didn't come with built-in USB, which includes all beige G3s. Ten bucks says Panther isn't going to run on this guy's beige box, regardless of how you feel about that.

A few things:

Okay, a few things besides the obvious "buy an eMac" if you MUST MUST MUST keep this machine:

* Max the RAM (which, IIRC, is 768M), but is getting more expensive since it's special voltage RAM for this line.
* Get a G3 CPU upgrade [sonnettech.com] either new or used (G3 Upgrades are hundreds less than G4 Upgrades)
* A new video card, if you're still using onboard video. A Radeaon 9200 PCI [compusa.com] is $80 from Compusa and probably be several orders faster than the onboard Rage Pro chip.
* Faster hard drive. If you're stuck on some old 5400RPM your perfrormance can suffer -- this goes in hand with the next thing:
* New IDE controller. The onboard IDE doesn't do DMA/66/100/133 and is a real dog performance-wise. Something new can give you a surprising performance boost.
* Ethernet controller. If you have to push the limits, can even think about a new ethernet controller that will have less CPU utilization. ... plus, if you do this and later want to move to a slightly faster machine like a Blue&White G3 , which can be had for as little as $100 in 400mHz/0M/0M configs, the RAM and video card will carry over.

Re:A few things:

* Max the RAM (which, IIRC, is 768M), but is getting more expensive since it's special voltage RAM for this line.

$180 [thechipmerchant.com] don't forget - its not just voltage - its gotta be THIS ram, else its too tall for the case.

* Get a G3 CPU upgrade either new or used (G3 Upgrades are hundreds less than G4 Upgrades)

$169 for a G3/500, 300 for a G4/500 and $500 for a G4/1GHz (on a 100 mhz buss, YEAH!) [sonnettech.com]

* A new video card, if you're still using onboard video. A Radeaon 9200 PCI is $80 from Compusa and probably be several orders faster than the onboard Rage Pro chip.

pffff.. okay.. i'll give you this. $80.

* Faster hard drive. If you're stuck on some old 5400RPM your perfrormance can suffer -- this goes in hand with the next thing:

$80 for your average everyday 80 gig 7200 RPM hard drive.

* New IDE controller. The onboard IDE doesn't do DMA/66/100/133 and is a real dog performance-wise. Something new can give you a surprising performance boost.

i'm sure we'll be using it not only for Photoshop, but for video editing too... so lets get ATA 133 and USB 2 and Firewire all at the same time... because i'm starting to wonder wtf all these PCI cards are going to go in a machine with only 3 slots....

$180 [sonnettech.com]

* Ethernet controller. If you have to push the limits, can even think about a new ethernet controller that will have less CPU utilization. ... plus, if you do this and later want to move to a slightly faster machine like a Blue&White G3 , which can be had for as little as $100 in 400mHz/0M/0M configs, the RAM and video card will carry over.

personal experience tell me this is a $20 item.

what's that all cost us bob???

$710 for a screaming G3 Frankenmac with every slot filled much like a high priced porno actress.

add $140 for a G4 500 to give you an amazing, unaccelerated, PCI based 500 megahurts piece of shit for $850 flat!

I mean - its only got a worse video card, slower bus speed, and no free 17 inch monitor when compared to a perfectly overpriced eMac.

i need to drink less dr pepper before bed.

holy crap

This is probably one of the worst questions I've ever seen posted. Shouldn't this be an Ask Slashdot? Even so, it's a fucking 266, it's going to be slow no matter what you do.

I'm going to submit a story and put it under the Apple section, apparently they'll publish anything if you classify it as Apple:

Dear Slashdot, I've been an avid Apple IIe user since first grade. My old Apple IIe is aging, but I'd like to run Photoshop on it because my employer requires me to have it at home. Could anyone offer me any advice to help me in my quest to make Photoshop run in 32k of ram on a 2mhz processor? I'm guessing I will need to upgrade to the color card and buy an RF converter so I can use it on my JC Penny 13" color TV/VCR combo. Unless of course someone has some tips on running photoshop under monochrome. In addition, I would like to get into doing seismic analysis on my Apple IIe. I know this has typically been the job of large Cray supercomputers in the past, but my budget won't allow for that, so does anyone out there work for an oil company that does this on IIe's?

It can work

A lot of the advice about how sluggish OSX will run on this machine is probably being spouted off by people that tried this when OSX first came out, got horrified, and vowed never to mix the two again. Apple listened to such complaints [slashdot.org], and the fact is, 10.1 and 10.2 don't run nearly as badly as 10.0 or the public beta did.

At my last job, I spent most of a year using a beige G3/300mhz as my main desktop. It wasn't as snappy as my G4 at home, but it was much nicer to use as an everyday desktop than the more modern Linux & Windows machines I had access to, and for the sort of work I do (almost all in a command shell or web browser), this old Mac ran just fine.

The biggest problem wasn't actually the old CPU, but the fact that, with only 320mb of ram, I'd end up swapping a lot; and with a 4gb hard drive that was nearly full just with the OS and a few applications & some files (but not much, most data I'd store & access remotely via Samba or NFS), the virtual memory system would start trying to take up more disc space than was available. I ended up having to reboot the thing every couple of weeks, but *not* because the overall system was unstable, but because I was using 25% or more of my disc for swap, the drive was full, and applications started acting funny when they couldn't allocate more space. Usually it would help a lot just to log out & back in again, but to be sure I'd just reboot, since logging out & in took say three minutes, while rebooting took four. It was just as easy to flush everything out that way rather than logout only -- I'd already lost state in all my applications anyway, so why not reboot...

So yes, you can more or less happily run OSX on old beige G3s. As others have said, it makes sense to put in as much ram as you can, but not so much because you want to improve performance (that will actually be fine, for the most part), but because having more ram will stave off swap-death as long as possible. Likewise, if you can find an old SCSI drive to put in there, that will help for similar reasons -- once you start swapping, you have more leeway with a bigger disc. The actual speed at which an old G3 does things should for the most part be pretty reasonable for many tasks (shell, web, Office, etc).

Have fun :-)

I have one

I have a beige G3 and have experimented with OS X on it, aside from simply being and old and slow computer the big drawback for me is the lack of support for peripherals. It uses ADB and Serial bus instead of USB, SCSI instead of FireWire (though that probably is less of a problem) . Since it is the ONLY model to both support OS X and use these older standards nobody is ever going to bother writing drivers for anything that uses them. My serial printer isn't supported, my ADB Wacom tablet, etc.

Wait and install Pan-thor

you'll see dramatic improvements that may make it useable.
oh - and load up on some ram.
you'll also do well to pick up a decent 7200 rpm IDE drive.

oh for the love of gawd DON'T BE SUCH A PAIN IN THE ASS, LUCILLE!

by the time you drop $120 on the new OS, $350 on those fscked up "short" (you can't use normal PC 100/133 DIMMS because they don't FIT physically unless you leave the top off and if you're going to do that, Susan, just go and buy a PC for $150 and stop being such a girl) can't-be-found-anywhere memory except at some obscure "We have memory for the Mac IIvx" company for that hunk of ancient computing you have there to max it out to, what, 512 megs? - and the $100 for a decent sized hard drive, you prat, you've got yourself only a few pesos away from a refurbished eMac with 5 times the speed and a video card fruu uu UUUM THIS century.

you know.. i had this fight with someone who decided it was time to ditch all the Macs because the B&W G3/300's were to slow to run PowerPoint or Keynote compared to a new Dell 2.4 machine... and just throw out all that hardware and software investment (those B&w's are righteous OpenBSD file and email servers) because he thought "hey, why don't i just shove a pencil up my ass and say it hurts, so i sould go buy some PC instead".

I swear, Sally, if i hear about one more person ask "how can i get a 5 year old mac to run the lastest software from Apple that has system requirements for G4 and a video card with some memory and i wear this gigantic "i'm a cheap asshole" hat al the time, why?" - i'm gonna go off on a rant.

Look - there are no 6 year old PC's (Pentium II 200 with ISA slots and 8 meg AGP 1x ATI Rage Pros) running windows XP playing DiVX files, ripping DVDs, and running gawddamned Photoshop 7, okay? So while it may be novel and interesting to see you try this - why not pony up the money for that Commodore 64 web server while you're at it?

Look - i'm not saying you have to go sell your mother's body parts for cash - but you did say.. and let me get this right.

i want to run Photoshop & and Quark 6 on Mac OS X 10.2...

two of the most CPU and video card intensive apps out there on a computer from 1997?

well hell, Gertrude, i want to shit in my hand and sell it for $5 a handfull but i guess we're both in for big steaming bowl of toofsckingbad, aren't we?

And i hate to break this to you - but while you may actually succeed in this little game of Chinese "red-hot-fire-poker-in-the-crotch" torture you've concoted for yourself and actually.... physically.... get Photoshop to launch on that newfangled steam-powered machine running Mac OS X - you first must realize that when you are trying to run software worth 5 TIMES the value of your computer... ON that computer, that's as useless as picking up Beth Ostrosky on a Pee Wee's Playhouse moped.

Its quite a bitch, sometimes, that software ISN'T like hardware.. because if you're really so cash strapped that you can't scrounge up enough wampum by playing "pound the clown" at the corner sperm bank to buy a Mac from THIS millennium - but miraculously have on hand, and want to run the latest and greatest $700 photo editing software that would have made spy satellite guys from 1970 cream their pants at the site of the opening spalsh screen of Photoshop on a computer that really is as washed up as Gary Coleman (wait, he may be my next governor... hmm...) - then i can only assume that either there is some knucle dragging asshat boss out there that thinks "here, Christine, slap this shiny metal disk into your abacus at home" and figured you'd just work out the tiny new cunundrum by asking slashdot a question as improbable as "how can i make a device that will get Carmen Electra to fsck my brains out even tho i have automatic Karma bonus on slashdot?"

ORRRR

you ripped of your copy of Photoshop.

Because if you're plunking down the bling-bling for Photoshop and quark for Mac OS X 10.2 - yet you want to run those 20" s

Yeah, here's some tips.

Actually I posted a comment about resurrecting a Beige G3 in the "OS X returns" article over here [slashdot.org].

They key points are,

• Get a bigger hard drive (the 4GB-6GB standard on these are too small). If your G3 has Rage II on board video, your built-in IDE controller supports only one IDE drive, so you can't just attach a slave. I've done it, but it's not reliable.
• Get a USB card. These are cheap.
• Get a ZIF upgrade from a place like OWC [macsales.com]. 500MHz for $160 with a 1MB backside cache gives you a fantastic performance boost; I've installed a 400 MHz myself.
• Get at least one 256 MB DIMM. These are cheap. 400 MB is good to shoot for, but it depends on what you do (We've got an iMac DV with 128 MB, and with its light workload I totally forget that).
• I recommend getting at least an ATI Rage 128, as the Rage II/Rage Pro that came with the G3 doesn't like to display millions of colours at high resolutions, and OS X does like to display millions of colours at high resolutions.
• Install no less than OS X 10.2.3 (a fresh retail box of Jaguar would be at least this).

You can put in a G4 ZIF upgrade, but I can't vouch for stability or compatibility of those.

upgrading a beige G3 vs. buying an eMac

Buying an eMac makes much more sense. there are a few things you can buy for a beige G3 that will make it better. I've hot-rodded 4 or 5 beige g3s. Here's a quick list:

Radeon 7000 PCI card, $100-125. Dual display 32MB card. Pretty much the only game in town as far as video card upgrades go.

G4 Processor upgrade - I've seen a G4 366 ZIF chip as cheap as $89. Sure, its not the $500 1GHz G4 upgrade, but it gives u Altivec and twice the cache.

Max 'er out w/ RAM - about $75-100 for 3 256MB PC100 DIMMs.

For storage, HDs are pretty cheap. Spend about $50 for 40 or 60 GB of storage.

I've seen a Combo drive that can be made to work with OS Xfor $50.

So we're now sitting at around $399 worth of upgrades, not including USB/FireWire (another $50), and if you want a faster processor (and you are going to want a G4 for the Altivec) you're looking at an additional $200.

So right there, for a decent speed (500 MHz) G4, plus USB and FireWire in the above mentioned price, its $649 worth of upgrades, and you STILL have slow ass 10T ethernet.

For $250 more than that you can get a Combo drive eMac w/ more HD space, faster networking, AirPort extreme capabilities, more USB ports, new (optical) mouse and keyboard, a later generation G4 processor running almost twice as fast, a better graphics card with AGP as opposed to PCI (think Quartz Extreme support for Quark 6!), and a really nice built in 17" monitor, etc etc etc.

Buy the eMac. Seriously. Not to mention the software trickery involved in getting all those upgrades together and working in OS X (editing the CD-RW driver support files, G4 cache enabler, tricking it into installing the DVD player, etc.)

Plus the beige can't boot from FireWire, and if you want decent HD performance you'll need an ATA card as well (another $50.) See how it all adds up in favor of just buying a new eMac? Its faster, easier, will give you WAY less headaches, and will perform better for what you want.

Now, if you were just a hobbyist looking for a cool project to trick out a beige, I'm the guy you wanna talk to :) But for your purposes, a new eMac will be almost as cheap for far better performance.

ADB mouse is flaky

I have Jaguar running on a beige G3 / 333 and it runs very well. However, when using the ADB mouse there is an unfortunate delay between a mouse click and the system taking notice of the click, often resulting in missed drags.

To remedy this I installed a cheap USB card (no extra drivers required!) and now use a USB mouse instead. The system works perfectly, albeit noticeably slower. More RAM and a 32MB ATI card would go a long way towards improving performance. A RAID card would likely boost performance even more. And upgrading the processor to a G4 wouldn't hurt either.

The one insurmountable bottleneck on these old boxes is the slow (66MHz) system BUS. Anything to reduce the amount of data processing in-general will help its performance. I was able to get a marked performance increase in the Window Manager by turning off window-shadows using a nice haxie by Unsanity.

2 options

1) get an eMac. You'll be much happer.
2) However, i'v done this. So here's what i didn:
Get a lot of ram. At least 256 more(maybe you can get by with less as i also run openoffice, but ram is dirt cheap).
Don't expect to run anything in Classic mode. It runs really shitty (worse than usual) on these old boxen. So you may end up having to shell out for all new apps.
However, all will be in vain, as the screens on those are too lo res to run anything properly. You'll fin that the control panel and many dialogs don't fit on the screen. If you're gonna buy a new monitor/grafx card, it'll make mroe sense to buy a new eMac.

Personally i'd get a eMac. It's got much better hardware, a damn nice screen and it can pump out classic mode apps reasonably ok. You can get the base model for only $799, which is pretty damn cheap.