[G4] G4 450 Harddrive Question

[Richard Klein]

Rob Marles wrote:
> Hi There
>  
> New to Macs in general, coming from a PC background.
>  
> Can anyone tell me how many drives the controller will support in a 
> G4 "Sawtooth" AGP PowerMac (I think I've described the model right, has 
> a Gigabit Ethernet card as well)

If it's got built-in gigabit ethernet than it's probably the "Gigabit 
Ethernet" model that came just after the "Sawtooth", but those two 
models were very similar, in any case.  Plug your serial number in here 
to find out for sure:
http://www.chipmunk.nl/klantenservice/applemodel.html

> Will any IDE drive work (ie an old 40gb Western Digital pulled from my PC?)

Yes, up to a point.  The G4s up 'til 2002 can't address partitions 
larger than roughly 120 GB.  I think the actual number is 137 GB, but 
120 is a safe number.  I gather there's a driver you can download to get 
around that, but I don't know much about it, or you can buy a PCI hard 
drive controller.

John Niven wrote:
 > Rob,
 >
 > I often seem to stand alone, but I think people are
 > too focused of CPU speed - something the industry has
 > not discouraged. My first assumption is that people
 > who are NOT using one of Apples latest offerings (and
 > are on this list) are interested in maximising their
 > computer experience on a low budget, either out of
 > necessity or (in my case) pure bloodymindedness :-)

Actually, the industry *did* try to discourage us from focusing on MHz. 
  Intel introduced something...I think it was called i-spec or something 
like that...that would supposedly tell you how various processors 
compared to each other regardless of clock speed.  Then AMD stopped 
advertising the clock speed on their CPUs (I think this started with the 
Athlon XPs).  For instance, my Athlon XP 2500+ actually runs at 1833 MHz.

 > If you are new to Macs, and have not used OSX, then
 > that's what you should try first. It's modern, beats
 > the hell out of M$'s offerings, and runs just fine on
 > older hardware. It comes with a lot of useful s/w and
 > a modern browser (you can also use FireFox, same as
 > your PC).

Why the heck do simple answers to Mac questions have to include jabs at 
MS?  That drives me nuts!

 > A 450MHz G4 is not the same as a Pentium. I have a
 > company-supplied Dell Precision M70 2GHz Pentium M
 > with 2Gb of ram laptop. I don't use it except for
 > mandated email use. Instead I use my personal 350MHz
 > G4 AGP with Tiger and the Office suite.

My experience is different.  My Athlon XP 2500+ at home and the 2.8 GHz 
Pentium 4 (both running Windows XP) are both clearly faster than my 933 
MHz Quicksilver 2002.  The Quicksilver is still fast enough for the vast 
majority of what I want to do, but things do get bogged down once in a 
while, and the GIMP, in particular, takes much longer to launch than on 
the Windows computers.  BTW, the Quicksilver has 1.5 GB of RAM and a 128 
MB Radeon 9800 Pro video card.  Uptime, right now, is over 10 days 
because I had to restart after some software updates 10 days ago.

-- 
Rich