Cool Mac Gear

My family are not exactly high-end computer users. My daughter is pursuing her freshman year at university with a couple of old PowerBooks -- a 1400 and a 5300.

I’m the “power user” in the family, with a two and one-half year old 500 MHz G3 Pismo PowerBook, and a new 700 MHz G3 iBook -- the second - slowest model Apple currently makes.

My son, former Applelinks columnist Tristan Moore, recently decided that he needed dependable transportation more than his Lombard PowerBook -- which he sold to partly finance a vehicle purchase, and replaced with an old Umax S-900 tower that he picked up for Can$20s.

The S-900 has a 200 MHz 604e processor, a 9 gigabyte hard drive, 128 megabytes of RAM, and a decent video card with 8 megabytes of VRAM. I gave him a spare PCI USB adapter card I had, and he’s in business.

“You know,” he commented this week, “this computer is all I really need right now. OS 9 is still a pretty good operating system, and for email and Web surfing, this machine is more than adequate.” This from a guy who was a staunch OS X fan from beta days.

I guess I could say the same for m own S-900 if that sort of use was all I needed it for. Mine has the same processor and RAM configuration as Tristan’s, but a smaller, 4 gigabyte HD, and a somewhat pokey video card pulled from a UMAX J-700. Its performance is pretty decent on the Web with a Global Village Platinum 33.6 bps modem. Where it falls short for me he is in speed scrolling through documents -- possibly a faster video card would help there -- and it really doesn’t support dictation software. iListen 1.1 works, but very, very slowly. Not really usable (please note that this machine is not officially supported by iListen).

Dictation software speed was also really the only major complaint I had about the performance of my 233 MHz WallStreet PowerBook, which otherwise was an adequate performer for the sort of stuff I mostly do. ViaVoice Millennium Edition would run tolerably well, and was usable, albeit considerably less than real-time responsive. iListen 1.2, which was the last version I had installed on the WallStreet before it died last summer, ran as well, but slower than ViaVoice ME. Otherwise, I was generally quite satisfied with the 233 MHz G3’s performance right to the end.

With the Pismo in OS 9 I have no speed complaints at all. Both iListen 1.5.2 and ViaVoice ME copy dictated text with very little lag, and Finder performance is excellent. I have been less happy with that machine’s OS X performance, which is lazy to say the least. I suspect that the 8 MB RAGE 128 video card is a major culprit. However, while ViaVoice for OS X is nearly real-time responsive on the Pismo, iListen 1.5.2 is very sluggish in OS X, which I don’t think I can blame on video card performance.

The new iBook offers a significant improvement in iListen response in OS X, and presumably ViaVoice will run smartly too, if I can ever get it to work at all, but that’s another movie. With its 16 megabytes of VRAM and RADEON 7500 video card, the iBook supports Quartz Extreme, and “OS X Finder performance is substantially better than on the Pismo, or at least that is my early impression. I haven’t really done any production work on the iBook yet.

At this point in time, the little 700 MHz iBook offers all the performance I need. I don’t do any high-end graphics or video work, I’m not a gamer, and I don’t crunch a lot of numbers. A faster machine than the iBook, while it would be nice to have, would really represent a lot of unutilized power most of time. For others, a dual processor, 1.25 GHz Power Mac isn’t enough. It really depends on what you want to do with your computer and what software you need to run.

My daughter mainly uses Nisus Writer 6 and AppleWorks 5 on her PowerBooks. She is running OS 8.1 on the 5300, and OS 8.6 on the 1400. The old 603e chips, (100 MHz and 133 MHz respectively) combined with the slow internal buses and mediocre video support don’t offer very scintillating performance, and system/application start-ups are grindingly slow, but once they are up and running, the necessary software performs adequately. Eudora 5.1 for email and Netscape 4.8 for surfing are the only other applications she uses regularly. A fast G3 iBook or a PowerBook would be hard to justifying cost-wise for that sort of low-end computing.

My wife gets along quite happily with Microsoft Word 5.1 for word processing, Eudora 3.1.3 for email, and Netscape 4.04 for the small amount of surfing she does on the old LC, which has 20 MB RAM, and a 160 MB hard drive. There are several faster machines in the house of course, but the LC is familiar, reliable, and has a nice, sharp Trinitron monitor.

So how much computer do you need? I would say that as a rule of thumb, as long as you don’t find yourself waiting whole lot for the machine to catch up with you, and all of the software you want to use is supported, your computer is adequate for your requirements.

A year or so ago, Low End Mac’s Dan Knight proposed that the minimum general-purpose computer was a 350 MHz G3. I suspect that Dan may have revised that upwards a bit more recently, but most non power users could quite happily get along with a 350 MHz G3 I think, provided they are content to run OS 9. When OS X enters the picture, it’s a different story.

Some folks are running Jaguar on 233 MHz G3s, and profess to be satisfied with the performance. I’m sure I wouldn’t be. My son had Jaguar installed on his 333 MHz Lombard when he sold it, but was beginning to find the sluggish Finder performance frustrating. I expect that maybe one reason he is finding the UMAX S-900’s performance so surprisingly satisfactory is that it’s likely faster than what he was accustomed to running OS X on the Lombard (although he uses 2.4 GHz Pentiums at work). I asked him about the latter, but he says that the S-900 offers livelier Finder and surfing performance on his home dialup setup than the 2.4 GB Pentiums do. “You’re joking,” I replied. “Nope,” he insisted. “Of course when you get onto processor intensive stuff, the Pentium would smoke the 200 MHz 604e, but for light duty work, the old S-900 feels faster and more responsive.”

OS X has really altered the landscape with regard to minimum hardware, and with due deference to those happily using X on lesser equipment, I would suggest that the new minimum spec. if you’re serious about running Jaguar would be a 600 MHz G3 with 256 MB (and better, 384 MB or more) of RAM and a RADEON video card with at least 16 MB of VRAM for Quartz Extreme support.

Quarts Extreme actually gives the G3 processor a new lease on life, since it shifts some of the processing load for supporting the Graphical User Interface from the main processor to the video accelerator card, freeing the CPU and system RAM to address other tasks.

Unfortunately, that means PowerBooks prior to the April 2002, TiBooks, iBooks prior to the May, 2002 revision, and all CRT iMacs are out of luck as far as Quartz Extreme is concerned (the current $799 iMac has 16 MB of VRAM, but a RAGE Ultra 128 video card). Of course you can run of OS X on the lesser supported hardware, as I do on the Pismo, but I don’t consider its performance really satisfactory.

And there’s the rub. If you’re content to run OS 9 and appropriate application software, you can get very decent performance out of old PPC Macs like Tristan’s and my UMAX S-900s or any G3 machine. Indeed, the old PCI Power Macs can be souped up with up to an 800 MHz G4 processor, a Gig of RAM, and RADEON or GeForce video cards, and coaxed to run OS X Ryan Rempel’s XPostFacto installer utility hack. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that Quartz Extreme should even work with the appropriate video support, but I’m getting beyond the scope of this article.

But even with their stock processors, these older machines still have lots of useful life left in them if you’re happy to get along with the software they comfortably support (and you don’t need to do stuff like dictation). On my S-900, I use:
Browser - iCab, Netscape 4.8, WannaBe
Email - Eudora 5.1; Nisus Email
Word crunchers - Tex Edit Plus 4.3; Nisus Writer 6.x; Word 5.1
Graphics - Color It! 4.1
Database/Notepad. - NotePad deluxe 2.3

That same basic suite of applications also works nicely with my daughter’s 6033 PowerBooks,. For 68 machines like the LC 520, iCab is the only current browser still available. With Netscape, the newest version that will work his 4.08, which was released in 1997 I think. Color it! 4.1, amazingly, works on everything from the old 68020 machines like the original LC to Classic Mode in OS X 10.2.x running on the latest Mac hardware, and it is still my favorite graphics program. I wonder there are any Windows graphics applications that will work on everything from a 386 running Windows 3 to a 2.whatever GHz Pentium running Windows XP?

However, if you want to use Apple’s new Safari browser and suite of iApps, as well as a growing list of OS X only third party software and shareware, you’re going to need OS X and the hardware to support it. The cool thing is that you have plenty of choice either way.

Charles W. Moore

Cool Mac Gear