Hey guys, I usually stick around the xbox 360 forums but I have been offered an older Mac. They want $30 for it, I believe they said they have had it for a few years, couldn't tell me much more about it. Is it worth it?
Here is a pic of the computer
Or would it be better to buy a G3 Tower (blue and white) for $60. Again, no specifics on it, such as processors and everything. I just want a Mac to play around on, as I have been a "PC" user for my entire life.
I am also starting school for programming and have heard Macs are notoriously better for any schooling purposes. I know I can do most of my school work on my HP, but want the Mac to play around with too.
neither.. they are worthless.. if they were free then they might be worth saving from the bin.. but never pay for junk like this, because they are unusable and almost impossible to do anything with... proprietary hardware.. you might find some linux which possibly may just about run on them.. but not reliably...
Any I get go straight in the recycling.. and that says it all.. I still have a couple of working 486 era desktops.
By a "pc" user I guess you mean microcraps idea of an operating system.. try any old tower with more than 128 ram in it and look at freebsd or if you can drum up a whole gig of ram.. open-solaris 10
plenty of free unix operating systems around.. openbsd is broken tho XD
Looks like a late model G3 iMac. Prob no more than 400MHz PowerPC.
Good for a basic kids internet browser or office work. The highest OS it will take is OSX 10.3.
The insides of this unit is almost like a PC. IDE HDD, DIMMRAM and more.
I'll assume the computer will run MacOSX 10.3 in addition to the old Mac operating system (which was fine). MacOSX 10.3 (Panther) is, I understand, very close to BSD 4.4 Unix, the OS of choice by professionals and students learning computers.
The Unixen aren't ready to install by anyone but professionals, except for Solaris. That, however, would offer only programmers' applications, if it did install on whatever Mac you have.
However: Some Linuxen support the PowerPC, if that's what it has. At some point, the PowerPC came with the AltVec coprocessor, which allows fast numerical processing. However, you need a G4 processor with AltVec to burn DVDs rather than just CDs. (with AltV (Check Debian, Ubuntu, & Fedora in the Wikipedia.) Check the 'hardware requirements' of each; and make note, should you run across another PowerPC computer.
Debian Linux is a clone of Unix, and offers about 20,000 free packages to install. It's OS and all the applications have free source code that you can examine (in school) and modify for your needs.
I'm writing from a dumpster laptop of about 1993, with Debian Linux running quickly on it's 6 GB hard drive. It runs OpenOffice.org, GIMP, &c.
