[G4] Gifted with a G4/500

[Eric Smith]

Hi Christina,

I recently went through a process of upgrading my Sawtooth G4,
which, similar to yours, had 320MB RAM, with a 400 MHz CPU.
I wanted to run Leopard, just because it's there (and to be
able to use Time Machine), but assuming your hardware is in
good working condition, Tiger is an excellent choice for this
system - maybe the best the OS for it.

I ran Tiger for years even without upgrading from that
configuration, but you would benefit from at least a couple
things:

- Number one, I would say to install more memory. You want
to have at least 1 GB, maybe more. That will probably speed
up the system considerably.

- Second priority would be the CPU. I upgraded with a Sonnet
1.0 GHz w/ 2MB L3 cache, and I'm pretty happy. Going to 1.8 GHz
is also an option. I don't have any experience with dual CPUs,
so I can't say if that would be noticeably faster.

- A Firewire external drive is good but will be slower than an
internal drive, even though this machine probably has ATA/66
internally. If that's the case you can have two internal ATA
drives. Depending on which model of G4 this is, you may be
limited to 128 GB max for each drive.
(See: http://lowendmac.com/macdan/05/1024.html)

To get more capacity, and better performance, you can add
a SATA drive, but that involves more expense because you'd
also have to add a PCI controller card.

- The stock video card will work fine, unless you want to
run Leopard, or do serious gaming. In that case you would
need to upgrade it. But there should be no problem with Tiger.

- Another thing you may want to consider is adding a USB 2.0
card, if your system does not have USB 2.0 built in.

- Yes, you can connect to your AEBS with Ethernet. That's
what I do and it works well.

Eric


Christina Samuels wrote:
> Hi all! My mom was cleaning out the basement and let me take her 
> pretty-close-to-stock G4/500 (it has a stick of 64 megs of RAM in it in 
> addition to the stock 256, but that's all the changes that I can see.)
> 
> I know this is far from the latest and greatest (I have a Macbook Core 2 
> Duo now) but I think the upgradeability of it is pretty cool. I just 
> want to play around with it, recognizing that it can't do everything 
> newer machines can do, and it's not as fast. So I don't want to spend a 
> Mac Mini-sized amount of money on it. I'd be using it for iTunes, 
> NeoOffice, surfing...light stuff. Not iMovie or processor-intensive 
> design work; I assume it's not well suited for that in its stock 
> configuration.
> 
> So my thoughts are:
> 
> 1. See if it still works (it turns on, I hear the disk spinning, but I 
> didn't hear the Mac "bong")
> 
> 2. Get a monitor (this was already in my plans, because I wanted one for 
> when I need to work for a long time on my Macbook. Can the video card in 
> this computer work with today's monitors?)
> 
> 3. Get more RAM
> 
> 4. Install Tiger
> 
> 5. Hard drive? Superdrive? Processor upgrade? I've read that a processor 
> upgrade is not a good investment because these machines are still so 
> behind the Intel Macs. A super drive is not that expensive, so, maybe? I 
> already have an external firewire drive that I use for Time Machine 
> backups, so I don't know about getting a hard drive. But I know they're 
> also pretty cheap, so, maybe?
> 
> I don't need wireless because I have an Airport Extreme Base Station and 
> (I'm assuming) I can just connect it by Ethernet.
> 
> Is there anything I'm not thinking of? Any other suggestions you experts 
> might have? Thanks very much in advance for any advice you may be able 
> to lend!
> 
> Christina
> 
> 
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