OT:Mac Fans- Opinions on used iMacs

[wheresgrant3]

A few months ago my company gave me a choice.... turn in my old IBM Stinkpad for a brand new one with a 14" display.... or give in to the force and get a 12 "ibook. I choose the iBook, and sadly, for me, the transition to Mac OS hasn't been very smooth. I'm having the roughest time using Excel (which my job depends on).

 

But I am determined... I'm thinking of picking up a used iMac on Ebay, just to kick around... surf the net, send email...etc. I see them on Ebay in the $200-$500 range. Would it be worth it to pick up one of these guys just for that purpose?

 

For Instance on ebay I saw Apple iMac G3 350 / 128 MB RAM / 6 GB HD for $150.

[mr.rob]

Good god you'd have to pay me use use such obsolete hardware.

That's REALLY slow for music applications I mean to say. if you just want to like ballance your checkbook on it the thing should be fine. But if you have some notion that a 350mhz mac is better for music than any PC well I think you're going to be in for some times of trials because that sort of machine wouldn't run any of the software I use very well.

[urbanscallywag]

If you've got an older monitor around, a beige G3 is probably going to be a much better value. Cheaper to ship too.

 

Speed wise, 350MHz will be more than enough for web, email, and MS Office. I think that OS 9.2.2 is much more responsive for older G3s and G4s, but 10.3 isn't bad.

 

What problems are you having with Excel? I would guess that key commands are the biggest difference in similar versions of the software.

 

As long as you don't need PCI slots or legacy serial ports, you can't go wrong with an iMac for daily usage.

 

You might try http://newyork.craigslist.org to find one for sale locally, and save on shipping.

[Analog Kid]

To put it in perspective, my beige G3-233/66 with 256 ram will actually kick Digital Performer 3.11 around purty good. I can pile up an insert channel of about 5 stereo FX, including verb... I could even play the Arturia CS-80v... Hmnnnn...

I've been spending some time looking at upgrade options- I think I've decided on the 800mhz Sonnet ZIF G4, for $261 at NewEgg.com.

While I dont plan on using X on this machine it will run Panther with the help of Xpost Defacto. This setup suits my Legacy needs, ie-SCSI for the DP-DJ70mkII sample transfer, serial for my wonderful MOTU miditimepiece II (god these things are cheap now-- even without hooking it to a computer they make a great buy), and OS 9 for compatibility with my Korg Oasys farmcard, MOTU Freestyle (my fav sequencer) and possibly the Scope platform in the future, which is still not OSX compatible.

My graphics card is a Radeon 7200, which probably was a mistake as I've come to think about picking up a 9200 for it instead.

 

My 233mhz Powerbook ran Jaguar fairly well... It's all relative... getting a Wallstreet with a 14.1" screen for a couple hundred bucks and adding a 500mhz Sonnet G3 for $250 isnt a bad way to go-the dual swappable bays are pretty cool and the dual PMCIA's help offset the lack of internal expandability. In fact, it may be more expandable than the imac, since you can have up to 3 internal HD's, and add a Magma PCI chassis with the card interface... There are other advantages...

Then again ibooks are cheap enough too.

 

If you really need to run synths on older G3's i would only recommend Absynth or Reason.

 

I mentioned in a thread last week about the 1700mhz Cube... but the 1.7ghz card is suitable for the towers too, (there are also dual CPU solutions) So those models still make good choices to let you stretch out a little bit more with configuring it.

 

Hmnnn.... I think i just like old macs too much.