£100 G3 iMac?

[0098386]

My old college is rumoured to be selling off their old iMacs for £100 a piece, maybe less. That a good price? I remember using them years ago but they were pretty bad. i blame OS9.
Can i run OSX on a G3 iMac? well... Tiger? Just i'd love my Powerbook and a nostalgic machine working side by side. especially when the iMac has a dandy 768mb RAM, apparently.

should i buy? or haggle a cheaper price? or what?

 

[edesignuk]

What specs are they. There's a wide variety, something like 233-600MHz.

 

[Jaffa Cake]

You can certainly run OS X perfectly on an iMac, especially given the RAM they've supposedly got in them – but I'd find out what the processor speed and hard disk size is before deciding if £100 is a fair price.

 

[0098386]

that was another question i forgot to ask. do the colours matter? I mean on eBay im seeing a "snowy" iMac at 600mhz? I know we have some snowy iMacs.

there are all the colours of the rainbow for sale. slot loading, tray loading, blues greens oranges and white.

I had no idea that with an adapter you can get Airport on them! that makes it a much better deal. sure i can just share the internet via ethernet but you gotta love wireless

 

[Jaffa Cake]

that was another question i forgot to ask. do the colours matter? I mean on eBay im seeing a "snowy" iMac at 600mhz? I know we have some snowy iMacs.

If memory serves (it seems such a long time ago ) the snowy iMacs were one of the last revisions before they went to the G4 'lamp' iMacs. As a general rule of thumb, if it's got a slot loading optical drive it's one of the later models. My old indigo G3 iMac from the same revision as the snowy and had no problems handling Panther – I never tried Tiger on it so I can't vouch for it personally. Just make sure you get a full list of the specs so you know exactly what you're buying.

 

[Josh396]

If memory serves (it seems such a long time ago ) the snowy iMacs were one of the last revisions before they went to the G4 'lamp' iMacs. As a general rule of thumb, if it's got a slot loading optical drive it's one of the later models. My old indigo G3 iMac from the same revision as the snowy and had no problems handling Panther – I never tried Tiger on it so I can't vouch for it personally. Just make sure you get a full list of the specs so you know exactly what you're buying.

You're right that the snowy model were part of the last revisions. I believe they came in at 500 Mhz but I could be wrong. I have a graphite G3 500 Mhz iMac that is currently running 10.4.2 with only 256 MB of RAM and it's not terrible. I can imagine if I upgraded the RAM to 768 it would be much better.

 

[Jaffa Cake]

You're right that the snowy model were part of the last revisions. I believe they came in at 500 Mhz but I could be wrong.

I've had a look at LowEndMac and apparently the snowy weighed in with 500, 600 and 700MHz models. All in all, there were a lot of models in a lot of colours, so just make sure you know exactly which iMac you're spending your hard-earned coin on, raggedjimmi – and I'd steer clear of the Flower Power special edition, too.

 

[iPhil]

iMac G3

My old college is rumoured to be selling off their old iMacs for £100 a piece, maybe less. That a good price? I remember using them years ago but they were pretty bad. i blame OS9.
Can i run OSX on a G3 iMac? well... Tiger? Just i'd love my Powerbook and a nostalgic machine working side by side. especially when the iMac has a dandy 768mb RAM, apparently.

should i buy? or haggle a cheaper price? or what?

Im running tiger on iMac 400mhz G3 Dv with 384Mbs of ram and 30Gb HD..
If you wanna do simple stuff: E.g. textedit,web surfing, some tunes and some dashboard games .. It run but not like G5 or G4 .. 100 euro price sounds fair or haggle little bit down.. i paid 67 euros for my G3 iMac .. and its my first Mac.

iphil



Edit: the Machine i bought had 128Mbs of ram,but i added 256 stick of ram and tiger .. because had No OS on it ...