Afternoon,

Today, there was a computer fair on at our local leisure center, so I decide I'd go. I turned up, and was greeted by a turquoise iMac G3. Needless to say, £20 for an iMac sounded cheap, so I bought it. Got it home, plugged it in and it "just worked". Nothing else.

Specs are a little lowly (350mhz PPC chip, 320mb RAM and a 40gb HDD) but it feels so snappy! Like everything just instantly loads, whereas on Vista it would take a while to load Firefox.

I now see why you Mac dudes like them so much.

(I'll post a few piccies later when I persuade it to work with my Smartphone. )

Infact, i'm posting this right from it now.

You'll regret it.

I found you can't just stop at one!

If it's any consolation, we bought a Vista laptop yesterday. I have to say, while it's not screwed together as well as the Macs I own, it's not too shabby. And Blista actually runs at a decent lick, too.

I already am...

I'd like a little more speed tbh. Wheres the BIOS for some overclocking action then?;)

I'm really impressed at the build quality of this thing. It feels really solid!

Owning a Mac is like owning a top end Ford Focus.....it does what you want, when you want, and is reliable.

Owning a PC is like owning a Morgan. It's costly, has lots of little annoyances, but if you put the time in you really get something special out.

Horses for courses, I will always buy PC because I like to tweak. But if my mum wanted a stable, reliable...albeit boring computer...then a Mac is fine and dandy

I used to have one of those G3 iMacs, I bought it a couple of years ago.

What are you planning to use it for?

Have you used the OS before? What do you think of it? I'm surprised it's running as well as you describe, I'd expect it to be at least a little sluggish.

Shall we start taking bets on how long it is until you buy a speedier Mac?

I'd have said that a PC is more like a Ford - lots of room for tweaking and it feels like everyone's got one.

I just found out it's not an iMac, its a blue and white PowerMac. I thought everything desktop-sized was a iMac. Hmm.

I quite like OSX actually. I've only used it for like 5 minutes, but it feels so snappy and usable, even with the crap specs it has.

@Nick - Just going to use it as a general PC, for like internets when I cba to turn the Vista machine on. I'd like a little more speed though. I heard you can get processor upgrade cards or something?

Its a really good looking thing IMO, and the build quality is amazing. I'm also surprised at how well OSX handles upgrades. I just put another 192mb RAM in and a ATi Rage Pro 128 in it (from a ATi Mach64 ) and it just booted up as normal and asked me to change my resolution settings. Simples.

Here's a pic of it

I had one of those.
I overclocked it briefly.

A Windows machine is like a Morgan Aero 8. It's fragile, always has something slightly broken and chuffing butt-ugly but if you can get enough of it working and wound up right it'll be a hoot..

A Mac is rather like a Audi R8. You would bet your house on it never breaking and by God is it beautiful.

A Linux machine is rather like a Porsche. It can be fast or slow and you won't know until you try it out and the options list is utterly mind-boggling. However, you look at it and know it's a Porsche, and secretly wish that the design department contained some Italians.

Tell me how, or die.

I might try and graft an Athlon XP cooler onto it.

I wouldn't bother tinkering with the coolers and what not, well, perhaps give it a fan on the HS.
It's not terribly difficult in fact! All done in hardware.
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3-ZONE/yosemite/OC.html
Google is your friend as well.
I'll point out now that they weren't well known for their clocking abilities, and of course it's not like a modern board that'll cleverly do things to stop you from killing it. Set the thing too fast and you'll possibly kill it. But you know that anyway!

I've got an iMac of similar vintage, similar specs too, it's nice little thing, gotta thank Caz for some spare disks for it

As for BIOS, you'll find no such horror! Power uses something very similar to the Open Boot Prom, it'll be a command line like environment. If the Power OBP is anything like SPARC then you'll be able to use commands such as:
show-disks - Show all the disks
show-nets - Show all NICs
watch-net-all - Look for traffic on each NIC
showenvironment - Show environmental variables like boot device
devalias - Like alias' in Bash, set a device path to the alias "disk1" for example

Have a search and you should be able to find out how to get into it, again, if it's anything like SPARC you may be able to increase the clock speed on the chip...

Wow, that looks easy! A throwback to the days of jumper-overclocking Pentium 1 machines infact.

What speed did you get yours up to? Mines 350mhz. Will I be able to hit 400-450? Cheers Alex.

Thanks Ben, I'll give them a try when its finished installing its updates.

So come on, what version of OS X is it running? If you are having trouble finding a Mac alternative to a bit of Windows software, come on over to the Mac Software forum and ask!

Be careful with the overclocking, it could prove fatal!

I'd try for 400. Like I said, have a good read round on t'interwebs to see what results people were getting. There's a reason OC'ing them wasn't more widespread.
I managed to get 400 out of mine, but only really long enough to get a screen grab of the new clock speed. There was a thread on it back in the old place. I can't seem to find the screen grab now.
If you can successfully get 400 out of it, I'd be happy with that!
Although, having said that, I hadn't tried getting the HS smoother, nor had I checked on what the TM was like. Maybe with a flatter HS and something like Arctic Silver, you might be more successful.
But just don't go too crazy - much better to have it working.