Anyone still using a beige Mac?

[Texas_Ranger]

Out of curiosity... any of you still using one of the classic beige Macintosh computers on a daily basis?

I always used my computers until they felt unbearably slow, but while I had my beige G3 I got tempted to buy an almost-new iBook G4 (the white one) in order to run VirtualPC with Windows 20000 and now I've been feeling guilty ever since I quit using the beige one while it was still running fine... but every time I try to return to it it feels so slow and so many things don't really work any more. Quite a big jump back then, from OS 8.6 to 10.3.9 and a machine with all ADB, serial and SCSI peripherals to USB-only...

[Mury]

Upgraded from the beige one to my mom's used eMac about 6 years ago. Now it seems to be running pretty slow. I get ahold of DH's iBook whenever I can.

[Texas_Ranger]

My iBook is 5 1/2 years old now and mostly works, but Youtube is really pulling it down, as are large video files. I had one surprising improvement though... deleting the whole cache, history and everything in Firefox gave it an incredible speed boost!
Last month I bought a used G5 and had my very first real bad experience with both eBay and Macs - it was shot, probably the logic board, a repair costing three times as much as I paid for the computer. Beware of all G5 models, it seems Apple stumbled across some very poor components in that line!
Recently I got a nice beige 300MHz G3 with full RAM (768MB) and now I want to set it up running Tiger (10.4)... we'll see if that works. My current beige one (266 MHz) does run Panther (10.3.9). My girfriend always complains when I turn it on, she says it's too noisy... but I already replaced the original hard drive which was the noisest part! Of course, iBooks are totally silent.

[Civil War Seamstress]

Hey MAC USERS!! I dont' feel so alone anymore!!

I still remember fondly my 512K (that was beige).

My lamp (iMac g4) burned out the power supply in March so I had no choice but to upgrade to the duel platform G5 24" screen.

I do miss my lamp, because like you there was nothing wrong with it except running slow on HD type downloads over the net.
But the machine had other ideas and I had to move on. Now I have to get used to the new software. I still like Appleworks and although they told me it won't work at all on this machine, if I open an existing file in Appleworks the whole program works, if I try to open the application from its icon, it automatically quits. imovie 3.0 still works this way too. The gang over at Apple support thought I was pulling their leg.

[Texas_Ranger]

Don't you want to put your lamp into a sturdy box with lots of packing peanuts, tell me how much the shipping is and send it to me? (Of course I pay for the shipping *g*)
The power supply might be repairable by a clever electronics guy (I'm about to have a G4 tower power supply fixed by a German company and they claim to fix all kinds of power supplies) and I always wanted one of those! On the other hand, with shipping from the US it might be more expensive than an iMac on eBay...

My very first mac was a Classic (one of the successors of the 512k). It was so slow it didn't keep up with my typing, even though I was typing with just one finger! I typed and when I stopped and looked at the screen, I saw the characters appearing. Then my dad got a cheap used LC with a 12" b&w screen and let me use it for a few months, but I wanted color. So I bought a used Performa 450 (aka LC III) with 14" color screen. Maybe a year later or so, I scraped together all my money (I was 14 back then) and bought a real expensive used Power Macintosh 7200 running at incredible 90 MHz! On that machine I had my first internet experiences using a 14.4kBit modem. In early 2002 I upgraded to the former dream high-end machine, the beige G3 (used of course, about 5 years old by then). When I started technical school we were advised to get a machine capable of running Autocad, so I got tempted and bought the used iBook (half a year old and better equipped than the current model, but slightly cheaper, mine had a 60GB hard drive instead of 30 and 768MB of RAM instead of 256). That was my first real experience with OS X and some things were hard to stand... sure, I loved and still love the reliability of the system, crashes of one app never take down the whole OS, and multitasking is working much better, but pre-X versions were sooooo easy to use! Printer driver? Sure, drag one file onto your system folder, the system asks you what you want to do with it and that's it. Problem with a driver? Boot with the extensions off and manually remove the offending extension! With OS X, no one knows any more, what all the files are good for.

Occasionally I still fire up my PB 180c (one of Apple's most expensive computers, in today's $ it cost like US$ 6000 I think) for a round of Lemmings... or Shufflepuck Cafe. Or Oxyd. Or maybe Tetris Max...

I still have ClarisWorks 2.1 on my iBook (using Classic) - I know all the short cuts and menus, so why get used to something new? Apple Works 6 looks pretty different, Word is even worse (I avoid it at all cost because nothing seems to work the way I want).

Regarding my experiments yesterday... Tiger does work on the G3, but it is slow, and Flash is unbearably slow.

[YinzerMama]

Our lap top died a while back... it was "my" lap top, for some reason. It wasn't beige, it was white. It died.

My husband took it apart and had it laying on our dresser for MONTHS until I couldn't stand it any more, so I stuck it all in a giant Kohl's bag and stuck it in his random stuff drawer. I couldn't stand cleaning around it any longer.

He came home from work and he was MAD because apparantly it was laid out in some precise order only a geek would understand and he had every intention of putting it back together. Oh well. I got tired of cleaning around it...

He has a mac lap top now that work gave him but I don't know if we/I will ever have another. I'm kind of annoyed at the new non-replacable battery thing. I get by with internet access on whatever Linux running machine he's cobbled together. I don't even know what kind of computer to say we have.

I used to have a Mac IIvx, though. I always laugh when I remember some guy coming in my room in college and saying "A IIvx! The mythical beast!!!" Then he ran out and brought in more people to look at it. How strange...

[mgb1234]

Anymore I do not care what it is as long as it works ,back in the day I was into making dual processor boards out of 486dx single processor boards with wires running everywhere ,I think I paid $5500 to sears for my first computer another 486 ,I tried the Linux thing and spent countless hours with it.I still have a 450mhz tower that is faster then some of my friends laptops which says nothing.But it works and still surfs the internet and makes for a decent word processor.

I have never tried a Mac but have friends that swear by them, now it is just a Toshiba satellite that works and does what I need it to do,but then again so did the old apple with the 5 1/4 floppy's,I still think Dos was the best program no crashes and did what it was supposed to do or what you told it to do.....It has become all so complicated now

[maxfax]

Ahh the good ole days.. Cobbling together systems to get the best of the best. COuntless hours wiht Linus, and dare I say it, OS/2.. Being a DOS dinosaur myself it still frustrates me when I have a problem and can;t just go edit the congif.sys or autoexec.bat files.. ARGH..

Anymore I too don;t care what it is as long as it works.. This particular machine was on sale at Best Buy, CHEAP!.. IT does what I need it too and when it ceases I think I'll replace it much the same way.... Now printers... IF I coudl find a ribbon for my dot matrix I'd be hooking that baby up in a heartbeat.. This stupid paper jamming ink sucking cannon I have now disgusts me.. The ink cartridges cost MORE than a new printer with cartriges... It seems so wasteful but I'll probably just replace it when it's empty again....

[mp4]

I bought a new 13" Macbook Pro this summer and it is great. This thing flies and is the most stable machine I've ever owned. Literally never crashes. OS-X is great and the included software can't be beat. I honestly don't know why anyone would buy a PC these days. Yes, it can be cheaper but the never-ending problems just make them a complete pain.

[ChrisF]

I'm a systems admin who works in an environment with lots of Macs. One of the real bummers about this job is having older computers that work just fine, but no longer meet the needs of the users. I can't count the number of iMacs (the older G3 models) I've given/thrown away, even though they work just fine. I have a drawer full of titanium PowerBook G4...work great, nobody wants 'em anymore. A few machines I've kept because I just couldn't toss them out....a Mac SE (and I have System 1-5 disks that'll boot it), a Mac Classic II (my first Mac was one of these), and a G4 Cube. All work fine too.

Honestly, the more recent Macs (G5s and newer) are nowhere near as durable as the older machines. Desktop or laptop, doesn't matter.

At least with PCs, you can reuse some of the parts and build a new one, or you can install Linux on them and get a few more years of productive service out of them.