MAC advice please

dizzy

dizzy

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David Thomas
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Hi guys, I'm having probs with my PC and have been offered a second hand MAC with the following spec

Mac Gigabit G4 800MHz
1.5 GB RAM
80 GB HD
120 GB HD
dual layer DVD burner
keyboard & mouse
fresh OSX 10.4 install

I could get it for $100, perhaps less, but have no idea if it's any good. Advice please MAC gurus!
 
Hi,

That's not bad for the asking price as Mac's tend to hold their value's quite well(even the older G4/G5 towers do) Being as it's Powerpc based and not Intel like the later Mac Pro's you might find that running Tiger or even Leopard on it will not be as speedy due to some of the newer Mac software(putting OS X aside) being code written to run on Intel only hardware...not to worry as there's still a lot of older and current software that will run for a while yet on older Mac systems based on the Powerpc chipset.

If you plan on doing any photo editing I would look into upgrading that RAM to it's maximum)I'm sure that system uses older PC133 Ram and not the faster PC2700 Ram that the faster processor based G4 Mac's did-1.2Ghz etc...although in saying that, you might find that system is already maxed out in the Ram department for that reason.

Worth a look!!

Michael.
 
Thanks. Any idea what sort, if any, image editing software I'd be able to run? Would it be massively slower than an 18 month old budget compaq laptop that I currently use? Would the OS be similar to what's on the new iMac? I've looked at those a lot and love them!!
 
10.4 tiger is an OS below the current one - i actually agree in that it it will struggle to run that, what spec is your compaq and we can can compare?
 
It's an amd presario f700. Not sure how to get the spec as I took the stickers off it!
 
Found it, athlon 64 x2 dual core tk-55 1.80ghz, 1gb ram
 
yeah, for 100 dallars of hassle you may as well stick with what you have mate.
 
Ok, thanks guys
 
I've got an old G4 Tower, I think it is a 450MHz one, so even slower, it runs Tiger, OK, but it is slow. I wouldn't use it for any intensive photo editing, but it is great as a media server.
 
An 800MHz machine is JUST too slow to run Leopard (which requires 867MHz) it will run a web browser etc quite nicely. I have run CS2 on my 1.33GHz iBook creating an A3 poster out of a mixture of 15 photos and 40 cartoon pictures. It was usable but not exactly zippy. An 800MHz desktop would probably be 20% slower so again you could easily run software this ITS time. I would say that tiger + CS2 would run as this is what Mac users from that time actually ran.

I would say that it is certainly worth getting hold of if you want to try a mac before you spend lots of money but realistically it would not be a better setup than you have.
 
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