Many of you have followed my recent
attempts to simplify my computer life.
Late last year, I found myself with no less than eight computers
running at my home. Each of these machines was running a small piece of
my computing tasks. The large number can be attributed to my love of
tinkering and my love of
eBay.
After throwing a tantrum over difficulty finding some data, I
decided enough was enough. I sold or gave away six of my machines,
holding on to a dual USB
iBook for the wife and a Dell laptop I needed for work.
With the proceeds, I bought a new TiBook 400 at close-out prices
and threw in a 48 GB drive and 512 MB of RAM. The TiBook is a wonderful
machine, capable of replacing my desktops and allowing me to have all
of my data and applications with me at all times.
After a recent change in jobs, I no longer needed my Dell laptop.
Cruising the Internet for selling options, I found a gentleman in
Austin who needed a Dell laptop. Rather than buy the machine outright,
we made a deal for a trade. He had a Power Mac G3/300 MT (AV
version) that he no longer needed. We met in Austin, and I soon had
another Mac desktop. I felt no guilt in this new acquisition, as my
total number of units remained the same.
The G3 machine is strong enough to run current applications and will
serve as a great way to eliminate any storage issues with my PowerBook.
My thought was to reformat the 38 GB of drive space and install OS
9.2.2 with all my associated applications.
I set up my drives and completed the OS install, installing all of
the applications I use, and getting the machine hooked up to my
network. I was impressed with the system performance in OS 9 and
was happily working.
Then it happened! I grabbed my OS X disk and decided I would give
the modern OS a try on the older machine. I did not expect much by way
of performance, but I am hooked both on tinkering and on OS X's
stability.
Over the span of about two hours, I installed, updated, tweaked and
got OS X into the configuration I like. I rebooted and sat down to
give the machine a push through its OS X paces. After a few hours,
I realized that performance in OS X is very good, similar to our
iBook - and maybe even close to my Ti. The machine has 320 MB of RAM,
which seems to be the major factor in OS X speed. After those
first two hours, I knew that I would never boot into OS 9 on this
machine again.
While the older ATI RAGE video is not fully supported by Apple, I
found no major speed issues while using the machine. As I have written here previously, I find the
ability to work in multiple application smoothly and the overall
stability of the OS more than makes up for any speed loss over OS 9's
GUI.
My current OS X application ran very smoothly, although I decided to
keep MS Office (and all other Microsoft products) off of this machine.
As my interest in computer gaming has waned over the years, I have
found myself able to keep machines for longer periods of time before
upgrades.
My current needs are simple: Web, email, word processing, MP3s, and
the odd movie. Based on this usage, I have found OS X performance
to be quite acceptable on older G3 machines. Based on my experiences
with machines ranging from G4/500s to this older G3, I find the delta
between performance to be very slight.
For those of you running Beige G3s who are concerned by all of the
speed complaints regarding OS X, give it a try. You will find that
performance is quite good, and the OS is extremely stable.
