Due to the lack of two monitors, I haven't been using my
blue & white G3 very often in the
past few months, but I decided to switch it on earlier this week to
see if I could open a file that a friend had sent a while back.
It was a Windows Media file, and I hadn't been able to open it
because the version of Windows Media Player I had was apparently
too old. Not a big deal - just download the new version of Windows
Media Player and I'm all set.
Except that when I went to Microsoft's website, the latest
version of Windows Media Player available for Mac OS 9, which
was installed on the G3, is version 7.1. Unfortunately, it is
version 7.1 that says it's outdated.
At this point it wasn't so much that I cared about opening the
file from my friend; it was more about being able to open other
files in the future. I had brought my OS X 10.3 CDs to Montreal
with me and decided that this was a good time to attempt installing
it.
When I had initially formatted my 40 GB hard drive, it was on my
beige G3, so I had created an 8 GB
partition in case I ever decided to install OS X. I never did,
and OS 9 ended up getting installed on that volume.
This partitioning was one
of the reasons I didn't particularly want to install OS X on
the blue G3. OS X likes to use up a lot of hard drive space,
and applications are fairly large. However, it ended up working out
to my advantage. I left OS 9 and the OS 9 applications on
the 8 GB volume, and cleared out the remaining 30 GB or so
volume for OS X.
I booted from Install CD 1, and everything went smoothly. In
about 25 minutes I had the OS X desktop up and proceeded to do
some software updating. But I got a "Your computer has crashed,
please restart it now by pressing the power button" message just as
the 10.3.6 update was completing. I restarted - unluckily, the
system had been corrupted (fsck &endash;y &endash;f
couldn't find any errors on the disk itself), so I was forced to do
an "archive and install" just to get back to 10.3.
I don't think I'll be trying to update it again anytime
soon.
I was afraid the RAM might be to blame, but I used it for
several hours with no problems whatsoever. The old G3 wasn't
terribly slow, with the exception of some of the visual effects.
The video card is old, so I wasn't expecting it to be too fast.
For a 350 MHz processor, things load quickly, and while browsing
the Internet isn't quite as fast as on my PowerBook or my PC, it's
not exactly intolerable.
I upgraded Windows Media Player to version 9, and the file I
wanted to check opened just fine.
One thing I noticed is that when upgrading from 9 to X, if you
had any icons that were image previews in OS 9, the size of
the preview is not increased in OS X. In fact, they're
decreased! This is annoying, at the very least. Because they're
smaller, trying to find a place on which to double click the file
becomes a real pain.
However, because of the partitions, I can still boot into Mac
OS 9 and have everything exactly like it was before if I so
choose. I somehow doubt that I'll be doing this very often, if at
all.
So far I haven't found anything that doesn't open in OS X,
except for my ProTools project files. I've since gotten Cubase for
OS X on my PowerBook, which I've found to be slightly better
than ProTools, in my opinion. All of my recent projects are on the
PowerBook, and I really have no need to access the older ProTools
files on the G3.
Now that the software's updated enough for 2004, the question
that remains is, "How much longer will the hardware be truly
usable?" I guess I'll just wait and see.
