G3 Beige Tower
Written: Sep 16 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Longevity, stability
Cons: Still uses ADB and Serial
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| me.bcs's Full Review: Apple Power Macintosh G3 (M7104LL/A) Mac Desktop |
Two and a half years ago, I purchased my second Mac. It is still my primary computer, and is still amazingly fast.
I'd owned a 486 PC and a Mac Performa before this one, but this was to be my first high-end computer. Coming over from the Performa, it was dizzyingly fast. A 266MHz G3! Finally a computer that could keep up with me! Watching over my shoulder, my mother (a capable Mac user in her own right) quickly became disoriented. This was two and a half years ago, of course. So by now, it is a low-end machine, unable to keep up with the demands of modern software, and I am itching to upgrade. Right?
Not hardly. I'm running the latest OS (9.0.4) and the latest applications. But it's rare that anything slows me down. Only when I'm compressing digital video in iMovie, or doing mode changes in Photoshop do I get a chance to breathe. It almost never crashes, and when it does, it's usually just an individual application which "unexpectedly quits."
Apple has done itself a serious disservice by making this machine so fast. If I weren't leaving the G3 with my mom and dad in 2001, I'd probably wait many years before buying a new Mac.
The only problem I've faced is this machine's use of old-style Mac-proprietary ADB and 8-pin serial ports. So I popped a USB PCI card ($40) in, and that problem was solved. Seamless.
If you are looking for a used computer that doesn't act like one, give the G3 a good look. A new iMac is faster (350MHz) and cheap ($800), but I would consider a beige G3 if you want a still-very-fast machine with a floppy drive, or ADB, SCSI, and Serial built in, or a bigger display.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
me.bcs
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Reviews written: 1
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