[rescue] Sun Blade 100, SGI and Lombard advice needed

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Wed, Jun 07, 2006 at 09:00:00PM -0700, Paxton  wrote:
> They also had a couple of Mac Lombards laptops for under $200 each.
> Lots and lots of mac stuff. From those who use them what do you think
> of Lombards?

Far too pricey. Since Apple has gone Intel and started to deliver 
real machines (as opposed to their "developer only" ones) the price
of PPC Macintoshes has crashed.

Lombards are a good machine and with a memory and hard disk upgrade
can be forced to run Tiger (OS X 10.4) which works well on them.
The biggest problem with them is their batteries. They are Lithium Ion 
"smart" batteries and since the Lombard is six or seven years old,
they are dying off.

I have two perfectly good Wallstreets (with lots of memory and big hard disks)
that are shelf bound because they need batteries. Replacment batteries are
$130 on up, not counting postage (and for me VAT) which is too expensive.

The going price here for a 500 mHz G3 iBook is around $200, I expect a
lot less than that in the U.S. I just saw advertised for sale a 500 mHz
G3 iBook (the improved model with two USB ports), with a DVD drive, 384m
ram, 30g HD and an airport (11mbs WiFi) card. Asking price was $250.

Personaly I would not pay anything for a G3 Macintosh. Lots of software
will not run on them, for example iLife '06. I have not read anything to
support this but I expect that Leopard (10.5) won't run on them.

I'm not saying they aren't usefull, but the cost of modernizing them is
too high and with the prices of used G4 and G5's going down it's not
worth investing serious money in them.

Geoff.

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