Poll

Are PowerMac G4 Towers Good for Anything?

Only registered users are allowed to vote for this poll.
13 votes were received.

Well, they are faster than the G3 I'm still using	3		23%
Four of them and some plywood make a nice coffee table	4		31%
No, but I'd hate to see one in the trash	4		31%
Yeah, I see a super computer in your future	2		15%

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I don't know if these are Sawtooth or Dualies, but I may able to get some surplus machines for somewhere between free and $125. The slowest machine I have on site right now is a Quicksilver 866, so these have no practical use for me. I remember Paul F. talking about experimenting with cluster computing, and I'm willilng to invest a little for a learning experience and some hobby tinkering. Are these useable in this mode or should I just let the old girls go to the scrapper?

A brooch or a hat or a pterodactyl!

With a SATA card and big drive, they make nice home servers.

Send them to Paul F. I hear that he is building a supercomputer in an effort to take over the world.

When he's completed his goal he told me that he's going to buy the Pittsburgh Steelers for me. What? The Dallas Cowboys?!? They're OK, I guess, but it's just not the same....you just wouldn't understand.

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Heck, I was using the old Sawtooth last night to help a 5th grader with his homework. It's got a salvation army crt monitor hooked up to it, and it works just fine running Tiger. It's our family iTunes server and the web browser of choice when the Macbooks are in use by others.

Both my parents are still using macs slower than that. If these were being given away locally I would definitely put them into use as basic email machines.

My 99 vintage Sawtooth is humming right along as I am typing these words. It got a 1.2 MHz CPU upgrade years ago plus disk and memory upgrades. Iif I had to do all these upgrades today, it would give me pause.

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Dakota
My 99 vintage Sawtooth is humming right along as I am typing these words. It got a 1.2 MHz CPU upgrade years ago plus disk and memory upgrades. Iif I had to do all these upgrades today, it would give me pause.

I'm sure you meant 1.2GHz. I don't think I would put any money into one of these boxes either given the price/performance ratio of the current iMacs and MacBooks.

Well, I've got over 15ghz in eMac processors in my XGrid Supercomputer right now...

But still haven't figured out;
1) How to get it to do anything and
2) What to have it do if I could figure out how to unix-program a "Job" for it anyway.

It's very geeky cool though...


Some ideas though;
Nuke and pave 'em with OS X, and set them up as servers.
You can pick up copies of OS X Server 10-Client license pretty cheap, and use them as file servers, media servers, or even a Mail server...
Use one as a "backup" server.
Put one in your attic, find a cheap way (if it exists) to hook temperture monitoring leads to it, and make a year-round record of the temps in different parts of your house... design a brilliant heating system around that, and make money.
(OK.. there's some steps in there I left out...).

If they want $125 ea, pass.
If they're a lot closer to "free"... hey, experiment for a while... THEN dump them.

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Paul F.
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A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca c. 5 BC - 65 AD
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Good is the enemy of Excellent. Talent is not necessary for Excellence.
Persistence is necessary for Excellence. And Persistence is a Decision.
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Eureka, CA

If they are free or cheap, buy them and resell them.

I sometimes buy a palette of G4's, clean up the cases, pop in a cheap HD and post them on Craig's List. 'Last time, I sold them for $90-125 each. (Sawtooths.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/19/2008 10:30AM by Doc.

i just sold a 466 DA for $50 last night.

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Folding!

Daisy chain them with Firewire, then use them as automated system backups with SuperDuper.

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Freya says, 'Hello from NOLA, baby!' (Laissez bon temps rouler!)

my sister could use 2 of them... one to replace a 233MHz iMac that her assistant uses every day, and the other for her husband to replace the eMac that keeps freezing on him.

i have a 450 MHz tower that's going up on CL next... where's your sister, rz?

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