I was taking out the garbage a few weeks back and noticed that my neighbor across the street left his iMac G3/333 (tray model) outside his house for the garbage/recycle collectors to pick up. I went up to him and asked him about it and after a quick talk, he let me have it for free and even included the power cord! (no keyboard, no mouse)
Specs
- G3/333
OS 9.2.2
64 MB RAM
6 GB HDD
CD-ROM (not CD-R/CD-RW)
So yeah, I fired it up and everything works. But since the date keeps going back to "1956" after each reboot, it will be needing a new battery, which i can easily get at a local RadioShack. I checked the system profiler and it seems that the Firmware has already been updated to "3.0.F3" (iMac Firmware Update v1.2) so i believe it is OS X-capable in that regard.
Where I am today with this thing:
Well, to be honest, I haven't done much with it, but I am thinking of using it as a back-up workstation for me to do some very light Photoshop work or generic internet browsing (YouTube; iTunes)... or maybe I could install a flavor of Ubuntu/Xubuntu on it... I don't know.
So far, i have -NOT- spent any money on it yet as I want to know if anybody else here knows what the performance of a G3 iMac/333 would feel like when visiting a site like YouTube under OS X. I am considering purchasing the Sonnet Harmoni G3/600MHz upgrade for it if enough of you can tell me if you consider the upgraded performance adequate enough for watching stuff on YouTube. (if i went with OS X, obviously i'll be looking around for install CDs of Tiger 10.4; not the DVD version).
Just to compare,I have a PowerMac 6100/60 which i upgraded to a G3/500 and maxed-out the ram to 136 MB and even got it the A/V nubus card. But with the motherboard's bottleneck of roughly 5MB/s (according to www.Kan.org/6100), viewing stuff on YouTube, even on a broadband connection isn't all that stellar..... it's still painfully slow.
I have an extra 30 GB Ultra ATA hard drive (5400 rpm) in working condition lying around from another computer that died on me. I'm thinking of installing that in the iMac.
I also currently have a home network, shared between my Vista desktop, my sister's WinXP laptop, my network printer, and my old PowerMac 6100. Is it possible to connect (daisy-chain) a second router to my first router to further separate my 6100 and iMac from the Windows computers? See this pic for the layout i'm thinking of.
Recap of my questions:
1) Will the original iMac G3/333 with 512 MB of RAM (maxed out) and with OS X be enough to view YouTube smoothly?
2) What if I purchased the 600 MHz G3 upgrade?
3) With regards to the network layout I'm hoping to set up, could i daisy-chain my routers as shown in the above picture?
Thanks, ahead of time!!