Choosing a system and software for an old G4

On Jun 22, 2008, at 6:05 PM, Anthony Stratton wrote:

> I have a G4 400Mz with lots of ram and lots of hard disk space. What
> system should I run on it, and what are reasonable uses for such a
> machine?

My original G4/400 tiBook with 768 megs of ram and a 40 gig HD runs
OSX 10.3.9 with Adobe's CS2 apps quite useably, and is my backup in
case of losing my PBG4 1.5.

A G4 400 tower will be a bit faster than the laptop (maybe quite a bit
faster, depending on how much ram), but will still be useable. On the
other hand, it will be very fast with OS9.2.2 - and you can install
each on a separate drive partition and reboot as needed, plus use OS9
via Classic mode from within OSX, which is what I did for the first
few years of OSX. If I had a large Photoshop project, it was much
quicker to reboot into OS9 and use PS5.5, rather than slog away with
PS 7 in OSX 10.2xx (I ignored 10.0 and 10.1 entirely)

Roger Henriques
listsrhen.com

Anthony Stratton wrote:
> I have a G4 400Mz with lots of ram and lots of hard disk space. What
> system should I run on it, and what are reasonable uses for such a
> machine?

Tiger works fine on such a machine. Well some web sites with lots of java scripting and complicated layouts seem slow at times. My wife and daughter share such a machine just now and want "faster" but it's no where near unusable. (They also don't want to spend the family money on faster but that's another story.)

By lots of RAM, this one has 1GB.

David

On Sun, 22 Jun 2008, Anthony Stratton wrote:

> I have a G4 400Mz with lots of ram and lots of hard disk space. What
> system should I run on it, and what are reasonable uses for such a
> machine?

Tiger will work, as long as "lots of ram" means "at least 256 MB", and
ideally "at least 512 or more MB", and "lots of hard disk space" means
"at least 3 GB", and preferably considerably more than that.

Panther might run more smoothly -- the machine you describe is at the
lower end of what Tiger supported -- but it's getting to the point that
a lot of third party software (e.g. Firefox) depends on 10.4 or later.

What would you want to do with it? It would be fine for anything that
Tiger itself can do, for the most part -- get on the web, use Office,
use iTunes & iLife '05 (newer versions need a faster CPU), etc.

Really, any question along these lines can be answered with 30 seconds
on Apple's support site, or any number of third party sites, not least
including Wikipedia.

Requirements for OSX 10.4:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1514?viewlocale=en_US
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.4#System_Requirements

Requirements for OSX 10.3:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106163
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.3#System_requirements

Requirements for iLife '06, '05, & '04, respectively:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306336
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306338
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306339

Requirements for iTunes:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93030
http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/



--
Chris Devers

On Jun 22, 2008, at 15:05, Anthony Stratton wrote:

> I have a G4 400Mz with lots of ram and lots of hard disk space. What
> system should I run on it, and what are reasonable uses for such a
> machine?

Tiger
Media server
Backup server
..lj

At 15:05 -0700 2008.06.22, Anthony Stratton wrote:
>I have a G4 400Mz with lots of ram and lots of hard disk space. What
>system should I run on it, and what are reasonable uses for such a
>machine?

I have a Silver Door G4, 1.25 mhz PowerPC, 7.68mb RAM, enough HD
storage. I happily run 10.4.11 and Classic. This machine will boot
into OS9, though I did so only for a while after I bought it in July
2003 and haven't done so since.

I still need Classic, so I have no plans to upgrade hardware. I'm not
sure what I'll do if this thing fails unrepairably.

For those who care why I run Clasic:

   Hypercard I'm slowly upgrading to SuperCard. It ain't easy.
   FrameMaker I would be totally stuck without this.
   Exxel 98 OpenOffice sort of works but it feels like a
                 Windows application and I hate runing under X11.
                 It's also non-upward compatible in several annoying
                 ways.
   FileMaker 4 I guess I could switch to another DB; I hate the
                 thought.
   Priority 1 I would miss this.
   Street Atlas ditto
   Easy View I've been too lazy to switch to another way to
                 read TidBITS.
   Distiller It came with FrameMaker and would be expensive to
                 replace.

Art Evans

On 22-Jun-2008, at 16:05, Anthony Stratton wrote:
> I have a G4 400Mz with lots of ram and lots of hard disk space. What
> system should I run on it, and what are reasonable uses for such a
> machine?

The most recent OS that is supported. Likely 10.4.11, depending on
model. Reasonable uses are anything you want to use it for. Sure,
photoshop will be a bit slow and it won't run WoW, but it will do most
things a Intel MacPro will do, albeit more slowly.

Quoting "..lj" <raccoonljsworld.com>:
> Tiger
> Media server
> Backup server


I recently upgraded my G4/500 home file server to Leopard so that I
could add Time Machine to its backup routines. I wouldn't want to sit
down and use this machine for any serious work; but it works fine for
an AFP fileserver. I don't notice any decrease in file serving
performance than when it was running Tiger.

I've got a 1.25 GHz mini that I inherited when my company was
purchased . . . it's also running Leopard an has a FW drive hanging
off of it. This machine is the Time Machine destination for 2 laptops
and the fileserver.

We have an old G4 cube which has a 400 MHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a
40GB hard drive and it runs Mac OS X 10.5 quite well. In fact, this
use to be our old main system, and when it was replaced, my son took
it because it is faster than his brand new HP laptop running Windows
Vista.

--
David Weintraub
qazwartgmail.com

On Jun 23, 2008, at 1:17 AM, Arthur Evans Jr wrote:

> For those who care why I run Classic:

For what its worth, I recommend that you wean yourself from OS 8/9
applications sooner rather than later. There is always an optimal
time to make the switch away from old technology, and that window is
passing for upgrading from OS 8/9 applications. In time, converters
will become less common for your older file/data formats. It will
become less economically reasonable to repair or replace old
hardware. New desirable technology will be out of reach for you with
your older hardware/software.

> Excel 98 OpenOffice sort of works but it feels like a
> Windows application and I hate runing under X11.
> It's also non-upward compatible in several annoying
> ways.

Check out NeoOffice, which is an OS X-native version of OpenOffice.
No need for X11. It has a true Mac interface. And it is more
advanced than even the latest beta version of OO, which also no
longer requires X11.

NeoOffice (free and open source, donation requested)
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

> FileMaker 4 I guess I could switch to another DB; I hate the
> thought.

There is a very nice database that is part of NeoOffice. And it's free.

> Priority 1 I would miss this.

What is it?

> Street Atlas ditto

Have you tried Google Maps/Get Directions?
http://maps.google.com/

> Distiller It came with FrameMaker and would be expensive to
> replace.

I've been using a number of wonderful, free programs that let me
avoid Adobe's expensive offerings completely:

PS2PDF and Friends (free)
http://homepage.mac.com/catichenor/EdvantageSoft/FileSharing4.html
This is a collection of drag-and-drop AppleScripts that convert among
different Adobe file types. The stars of the show are the PostScript
to PDF converters, which emulate different settings of Acrobat
Distiller. There are other useful file converters and optimizers as
well.
You'll need to download and install Ghostscript to use these
AppleScripts. The fastest and easiest way to do so is to download ESP
Ghostscript from the Gimp-Print website at:
http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/MacOSX.php3

FormulatePro (free)
http://code.google.com/p/formulatepro/
Formulate will open your PDF forms and allow you to quickly and
easily fill in the blanks, without altering the original PDF.
Formulate will even allow you to fill in *locked* PDF forms, and to
save the filled-in form as a template, or to save the data you've
previously used in a form. Very easy to use.

PDF2RTFService (free)
http://www.devon-technologies.com/download/index.html
(scroll to bottom of page)
allows any program that can read RTF documents (including OS X's
included TextEdit) to open a PDF document as an editable RTF document
and save it in RTF format!
(Assuming that the PDF document isn't a graphic image of a text
document. PDF2RTFService does not do OCR.)

PDFMerge-X (free, $5 donations accepted)
http://www.malcom-mac.com/blog/pdfmergex/
combine, transform and reorder the pages in your pdf documents

PDFLab (free)
http://www.iconus.ch/fabien/products/pleng/pleng.html
lets you split and join PDF documents as well as insert images and
blank pages.

CocoaBooklet (free)
http://www.iconus.ch/fabien/products/cbeng/cbeng.html
This program lets you create a booklet out of a PDF file for
printing, which is known as pages imposition.


___________________________________________
Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
___________________________________________

There are good reasons to run Leopard on a home-server type computer. Back to my Mac can give you access to your home network when you're on the road (so you can keep sensitive files off your laptop but still access them abroad), only Leopard machines can run as a networked Time Machine server, and I'm sure there are other things. Plus it's faster than Tiger for all these basic server-type tasks. (Not sure about performance relative to Panther)

I've had pretty good results running Leopard on a G4 Cube (450 MHz, I believe). I made a hacked copy of the install disk, but there is now a software-only trick you can use to run the install.

<http://lowendmac.com/osx/leopard/unsupported.html>

It works great as a file and backup server. However, anything using Core Animation (e.g. Time Machine's recovery interface) just shows a black spot in place of the animation. (So Time Machine itself works, but I have to restore files manually rather than using the warp-tunnel interface)

Regardless of the OS version you run, if you want anything other than just basic file serving, I'd recommend picking up some RAM. 512MB+ is great, if you can get over a gig, there's a huge jump in performance. My cube only has 256 megs right now, and it gets pretty pokey if it's streaming video to my TV while I'm running a backup.

-- Nik

nikinik.net | http://inik.net | http://notions.inik.net

I work on a G4-466 MHz and have been very satisfied with 10.3.9/Panther. I have 1.25 GB of RAM, 2 internal hard drives (one for storing work projects, although I have the system installed on it as well), and a large (250 GB) external firewire drive for backups.

I do editing (Word), typesetting (Quark, Indesign), and graphics (Photoshop, Illustrator).

Alas, too many programs require 10.4/Tiger, so I will be upgrading soon (by booting on each hard drive in turn and running the installer on a USB-connected DVD drive I have) and I have a related question:

I read, I think it was at lowendmac, that 10.4.8 was the best version of Tiger for older machines. Is that true? Maybe when they wrote that 10.4.8 was the highest available?

I have upgraded my 400 MB/sec machine over the years and find it still quite valuable as my only machine. I installed a 1000 MB/sec Sonnet accelerator first. That was an enormous help. I have 704 MB of memory. The original 20 GB hard drive had the good grace to die and first I stuffed in an 80 GB drive and now have replaced that with 250 GB drive.

I also replaced the original CD read only drive with a CD RW drive and later replaced that with a CD/DVD Read/Write drive.

For a few years I had a Zip drive in the machine but it never worked well and I removed it. I also had a SCSI card in there and removed that because the SCSI drives are so small by today's standards.

I used to use an Apple 17 inch tube monitor which died. Now I have a 20 inch Apple monitor but I had to spend about $170 for a new video card to drive it. That was a surprise.

My OS is 10.4.11. Apple still publishes upgrades periodically. I use mostly an email client (Eudora), Firefox, occasionally an older version of Dreamweaver (too cheap to buy upgrades, Appleworks or Open Office, Quicken, Graphic Converter and iPhoto, iDVD, Radioshift, Carbon Copy Cloner, Google Earth, Vuescan, Amadeus II, Toast Titanium, iTunes.

I've made one video DVD which the 400 MB/sec processor will not do. The newest operating system will not make DVDs even at my 1000 MB/sec processor. One reason not to go to a later operating system.

All the changes are spread over the years since 2000. It might be too much $ to be worthwhile to do now. I do yearn for a new machine but will wait until this one points its toes to the sky before I splurge again.

Gil

On Jun 24, 2008, at 5:53 PM, gilwo wrote:

> I have upgraded my 400 MHz machine over the years and find it still
> quite valuable as my only machine. I installed a 1000 MHz Sonnet
> accelerator first. That was an enormous help. I have 704 MB of
> memory. The original 20 GB hard drive had the good grace to die and
> first I stuffed in an 80 GB drive and now have replaced that with
> 250 GB drive.

Did you also add an IDE controller card? I was under the impression
even some more recent Power Macs couldn't read more than 137GB of a
drive.

> I used to use an Apple 17 inch tube monitor which died. Now I have a
> 20 inch Apple monitor but I had to spend about $170 for a new video
> card to drive it. That was a surprise.


You shouldn't have to buy a new video card. I assume the monitor uses
Apple's short-lived ADC connector. If your Power Mac has a DVI port
(most 400MHz G4s do), all you need is the Apple DVI to ADC Adapter
($99 new).
http://store.apple.com/us/product/M8661LL/B

Even if you have the "PCI Graphics" model that only has VGA, you can
add a DVI to VGA adapter (Apple's is $19 new) which all adds up to
less than $170.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/M8754G/A

On 23-Jun-2008, at 02:17, Chris Devers wrote:
> Tiger will work

[snip]

> Panther might run more smoothly

Tiger runs better than Panther on the same hardware. MUCH better.

G4 AGP, 350Mhz:

Tiger feels good.

YouTube and other video stuff is a pain.

NeoOffice: forget it, way too slow.

iPhoto: Some things never worked, some do even with the latest version.

iTunes: To search a large library is a pain (iTunes lags after each character you type...). It is much faster to search the library (of the G4) over the LAN with a macbook.

I am still very proud to be able to work on a machine this old :-)

Maybe it would be useful if people would post what does not function...

Games, of course, are where the hardware limits are really felt.

Thanks Curtis

Well, that is interesting. It was either the Apple store or perhaps a Mac repair shop who told me that I needed a new video card. The problem was not the connection, it was that my old video card couldn't drive a monitor with so many pixels. When I connected it, I got only a blank dark screen. My old monitor was pretty dead so I could not play much with the settings to try to find one that did work. I think some later G4s could drive the 20 inch monitor directly.

I think you are right about the IDE card. I think that originally I had to use the 250 GB drive in an external enclosure and I also had to set aside the external enclosure that I had that would only go to 137 GB and buy a newer one.

I did not mention it before but I also bought a 4 port USB2 card when I bought my iPod.

I'm sure that the total of what I have spent is more than buying a Mac Mini and I would get the "benefits" of using the Intel chip. When this computer dies, I will probably do that.

But these expenditures are spread over 8 years. Each one plugged a hole that had just become obvious. No single one of them would have made it worth while to buy a new computer.