Found a Power Mac G4 tonight...

Ant84 · 30 Mar 2009 at 01:41

Complete with a 17in(?) Studio Display. 400Mhz CPU speed I think.

Am I likely to find any use for this nowadays? How easy are they to upgrade?

FreeStream · 30 Mar 2009 at 01:43

Both are pretty slow by today standard really! Cant run 10.5 either. eBay them, get £100 if your lucky

Spyhop · 30 Mar 2009 at 01:45

Doorstop, etc.. It's extremely slow.

Where did you find it?

Ant84 · 30 Mar 2009 at 01:46

Found it in the spare room of the house my uncle's just left. Says he doesn't want it.

Thought I could maybe upgrade and salvage some kind of use from it instead of throwing it in the skip?

Spyhop · 30 Mar 2009 at 01:47

Maybe you could bung a decent size hard drive in it, put Tiger on it, and use it as a home server

Ant84 · 30 Mar 2009 at 01:50

Hard drive the only thing worth upgrading?

From what I've Googled tonight, it seems a real pain (and considerable expense) to upgrade the CPU/GPU, so only the HDD and RAM are realistic options.

Spyhop · 30 Mar 2009 at 01:55

Well, if you do upgrade the CPU and GPU, perhaps you can play Pong at 40fps instead of 20

Ant84 · 30 Mar 2009 at 01:58

Might upgrade the RAM and see if it'll run Calculator.

Cheers for the help anyway. Looks like an eBay job.

Mr Kingston · 30 Mar 2009 at 03:49

make it a server is the best bet mate

artaxerxes · 30 Mar 2009 at 11:59

I just resurrected one of these... I hope to make a MAME cabinet, or make a torrent seed box, iTunes server, recipe computer in the kitchen.

I had to spend 99p to get my apple 17" CRT monitor though. Those 17" LCD hold a shed load of value, I know I tried to buy one for the last two months before i found the CRT.

The base unit is almost not worth selling unless it was tricked out.

SimonR · 30 Mar 2009 at 12:14

I run a G4 450 at home as a server (headless). I found a cheap supplier of PCi-X 4 channel sata cards and have one of these with a couple of 350gb SATA HDs.
I run sharepoint, itunes and connect 360 and it serves all of the media in my house. Currently it runs Tiger but am upgrading it to Leopard so that I can use it for time machine for my MBP.

Currently it serves my ATV in my living room, XBOX 360 in the bedroom my MBP and an Airport Express in my conservatory and it happily streams movies and music to all 4 at once.

I know that there are a lot of Drobo fans in these forums but I recon my G4 performs easily as well and is more flexible. Yes it is bigger but I have the ability to run it as an FTP server, an apache server, DNS server, it can act as a firewall and as a time capsule, a VPN gateway and that is without running Apple Server.

It will also run Kerio as full blown mail server and with a copy of Retrospect it can backup all of your network machines too.

Dont write that little blue machine off, as a server it is fantastic.

FreeStream · 30 Mar 2009 at 13:00

SimonR said:
I run a G4 450 at home as a server (headless). I found a cheap supplier of PCi-X 4 channel sata cards and have one of these with a couple of 350gb SATA HDs.
I run sharepoint, itunes and connect 360 and it serves all of the media in my house. Currently it runs Tiger but am upgrading it to Leopard so that I can use it for time machine for my MBP.

Currently it serves my ATV in my living room, XBOX 360 in the bedroom my MBP and an Airport Express in my conservatory and it happily streams movies and music to all 4 at once.

I know that there are a lot of Drobo fans in these forums but I recon my G4 performs easily as well and is more flexible. Yes it is bigger but I have the ability to run it as an FTP server, an apache server, DNS server, it can act as a firewall and as a time capsule, a VPN gateway and that is without running Apple Server.

It will also run Kerio as full blown mail server and with a copy of Retrospect it can backup all of your network machines too.

Dont write that little blue machine off, as a server it is fantastic.

You will have to hack 10.5 to get it to install on a 450Mhz machine.

My 867DP MDD was the lowest it would install onto without issues.