This week I went to visit my dad in California. He had been
living in a smaller apartment for quite some time and had many of
his things in storage, including his blue
G3, which he purchased new in 1999 and put into storage not
very long after. Recently he moved into a larger place and started
taking things out of storage; the blue G3 was among them.
His blue G3 had shipped as a 400 MHz machine with a 9 GB SCSI 2
hard drive, 256 MB RAM, and Mac OS 8.5. He had purchased a matching
Apple 15" LCD Studio Display (which, he commented, cost him more
back then than the 17" Apple display costs now), as well as an
Epson Stylus 1280 photo printer (the newer version of my 1200).
Once he set it up in his new apartment, he upgraded to Mac OS
9.0 and installed Office 2001. Other than that, all applications
were from 1999 or before. He had Mac OS X 10.2 CDs but said he
couldn't get it to install. I had no problem installing 10.2 (but I
upgraded Mac OS 9 to 9.2.1 first), and after downloading several
updates (which took quite some time themselves), it was almost as
good as a new Mac.
While Web browsing in OS 9 seemed buggy and slow with Internet
Explorer 4.5 (the latest version that was installed), Safari is now
probably 3 times as fast (I'm amazed that it's no slower than
browsing on my G4) - and the system's only crashed once in
OS X (for the curious, it was an odd problem where I was
unable to empty the Trash, I force quit the Finder and then found
that I was running two Finders, neither of which I could get
access to, so I was forced to hit the reset button). I installed
Office X as well. Ith isn't as fast as 2001, but it seems to work
fairly well.
The only issue I notice is that with OS X, the system
doesn't go into deep sleep, perhaps due to the SCSI card installed
(it had been an issue when I had my G4 tower also, under 10.1, but
was fixed with 10.2 on that machine).
Some things are definitely slower under OS X. Starting up takes
much longer - not a big deal, but a slight annoyance - and
processor intensive applications are slower. Miniaturizing a window
in the dock is delayed slightly due to the 16 MB video card, but
menu fading and the other effects don't seem too slow. Nothing's
nearly as fast as on my G4 PowerBook, but it's pretty quick for a
machine less than half the clock speed and without the AltiVec
engine.
As for the LCD display; everything's much brighter - whites are
clearer, colors are less washed out. My guess is that it wasn't
calibrated correctly under OS 9. And the photo printer - no
drivers needed even be installed, it worked immediately (unlike
mine, where I had to download and install drivers).
The downside of having all this up to date software is that the
hard drive tends to fill up quickly, to the point where the
9 GB had about 200 MB empty. Because of this, we decided to
buy a new 80 GB Western Digital special edition hard drive,
especially since it had a rebate.
A half hour after installing it, I was still trying to get the
drive to show up on the desktop. I had formatted it, reformatted it
- everything --- and it wasn't showing up. I checked the cable and
the jumpers, but it still wouldn't mount.
Finally I decided to connect the drive to the last connector on
the cable instead of the middle one. The drive mounted. Great, I
thought, and copied over around 3 GB worth of files.
I shut it off and came back to it later, only to find the folder
I had copied was missing, even though the 3 GB of space was
being used on the drive! I ran Disk Utility and Norton in OS 9
- the drive was full of errors, but whenever it was repaired, I'd
run it again, and the same errors would show up. I spent several
hours with it and basically determined that the problem is the
drive, not anything else. Calling Western Digital for a replacement
will be our next step.
I must say that an upgraded blue G3 seems to be plenty fast
enough for most of what I do (it lags somewhat in Photoshop, but
that doesn't bother me since I do a lot of that work on my beige G3, which isn't really any faster!). I
suspect that my dad will find it pretty fast also; he figured it
should last him another year or two.
Once that hard drive is working and he adds more RAM, I think it
should last longer. After all, many beige G3s are about 6 years old
now, and for many users, they still serve the purpose just as they
did when they were new, and they have no plans to replace them in
the near future.
