PowerMac G4

hillbilly2 · 21 Jan 2010 at 06:25

Would an old Duel CPU PowerMac G4 be ok as a everyday pc? I was thinking about picking one up as a cheap pc the have at work.All it would be do is going on the internet and abit of itunes(running Leopard),no serious programs.

fishfishfish · 21 Jan 2010 at 06:35

A few people I work with still have these as their main machines and they manage to work effectively with Photoshop and InDesign, though not as productively as those of us with MacPros! The Quicksilver and mirrored front ones are the ones to go for, as they were the latest versions before the G5 series was introduced.

NickK · 21 Jan 2010 at 07:24

Apart from being PowerPC based and that Apple has pretty much declared it's retirement so both applications and security patches etc will slow down over time.

artaxerxes · 21 Jan 2010 at 12:27

I have been using a PowerMac G4 single core 533 for the past week whilst the fan was replaced on my MacBook. Safari was acceptable after installing Glims and Click to Flash (as flash performance on PPCs is a dog. iTunes ran fine. I had a few issues with playback in QuickTime and VLC but your machine is 4 times faster. Check the dual isn't noisy as fek.

EDIT TO ADD It would be even better with a unix distro methinks.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCDownloads

MagicBoy · 21 Jan 2010 at 23:49

Depends how fast the G4 is. If it's a dual 1GHz plus with plenty of RAM then it'd be very usable apart from the issues with Flash. Anything less than an G4 867MHz isn't officially supported for Leopard.