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Awesome! I cannot find a G5 at a decent price for the life of me. I kinda want a snow iBook but I can't think of paying for one. Oh well.

The Clamshell in is great condition. It seems like it sat on a desk for it's entire life. (And considering the teacher applications that were originally installed on it, I'd say it sat on the teacher's desk.)

I only paid $35 for mine on eBay. The RAM was $6 and the hard drive was $11. I think I got a pretty good deal.
 
If I could have found a clamshell like yours for that price I'd have one, but I can't find a deal that good.

I bought the G5 in late 2008 for $500, and until I bought my Mini the G5 was the desktop I used for everything. like I said in the video, I still use it for idea editing, tho I'm still playing with various codecs to see if I can speed up the rendering and exporting time. Any thoughts? I know a converter called MPEG-Streamclip is going to be part of the answer to the problem.
 
I actually just changed from HP Windows to over to a new IMac and I love it!!! I never really wanted to work with Mac until started using one at work and I would it to be very nice and when I saw how well they work with data base programs I completely changed my mind. 
 
When w first got a computer it was a Windows 95 machine a cousin built from fairly recent (at the time, 96-ish) used parts. I barely understood it but could do what I needed it to do, that was replaced in 2001 with a fairly well loaded Sony Vaio desktop that I still have, complete with all the manuals and disks and original accessories. I kinda knew how to use Windows enough to do it and I wasn't good with computers much at all. I should get the Sony all together and make a video of it, would be interesting, we really did do well on that purchase. But anyway, at that point in my life I didn't care for Macs simply because I felt so lost when I was trying to use them. This was still in the time os OS9. Later on in high school I had a class that I had to use an eMac for, we all did in that class, we were assigned a seat at a computer desk. They started growing on me at that point, running probably OS 10.3, I remember when they were upgrading the macs to 10.4. We didn't have any Intel Macs when I was in HS, as they were brand new my senior year, we had some iMac G3s, tons of eMacs, and I know in the yearbook room the teacher had a PowerMac G5, everyone else used eMacs, I had a friend that was in the class. The first computer I had tat was all one to myself was a Compaq laptop, and even though I kept a decent antivirus on it and all the stuff you are supposed to do, it was never as stable and reliable as I'd like, so that I think is what really pushed me to try a Mac.
 
My "work horse" is a late-2010 MacPro2 running OSX10.6.8 (I haven't upgraded OS yet under the advice of my computer consultant) with:

- 8Ghz quad processor

- 8gb ram

- 27" LED Cinema Display

- two 2gb hard drives (one of which serves as Timeline backup)

- Adobe Creative Suite 5 Premium (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash Catalyst, Fireworks, Bridge & Acrobat Pro), QuarkXPress 8.5.1, and the complete Adobe font library plus a zillion other misc. fonts

I have a really nice Samsung 15" laptop that Arlee is currently using, and a fairly crummy HP 13" PC laptop that I use down at the church (connected to their wireless network) and when traveling. (I bought the two laptops in 2010 when I got my new Mac.)

I've been a diehard Mac enthusiast ever since the first time I laid hands on a Quadra 900 in 1991, at the printing company where I worked at the time. I admire the strengths of the Microsoft platform but have never been able to warm up to its "geek" aesthetic which still underscores all its products.
[this post was last edited: 2/12/2014-17:35]

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My first!

Was a 486 (I forget the name) but I think it just had "PC Systems" on the case, it was running DOS, and a friend of ours installed Windows 3.1 on it. Then I got my first Macintosh, my aunt found out I liked Macs, so she gave me her Performa 575 all in one. I really liked that machine, but it died, just wouldn't turn on anymore, by that time we had already gotten an AMD with Windows 98 as my first online computer. We found a Mac Performa 637CD to replace the 575 with though. After the AMD, I had gotten an HP Pavillion desktop with Windows XP in 2003. It worked pretty well but the Celeron processor started getting really slow running online and new programs. So last year I had an AMD based gaming PC built and running Windows 7. It's the fastest I've had!

I might eventually get an older Mac, probably an iMac, so that I can play old games on it.
 
I forgot...

There were a lot of them in school when I was a kid. Elementary school had lots of LC 575 and LC 5200 all in one units and color StyleWriter and ImageWriter printers. The computer lab had all Apple IIgs with color monitors and 3.5" external disk drives. The computer teacher had a PowerPC G3 all in one plus one more off to the side. The last year I was there, the Apple IIgs were replaced by the first iMac G3 in blueberry and there were iMac posters on the walls showing all five colors. I thought that was really cool.

The middle school too had LC 575 and LC 5200, most of the teachers had Dells though. There was one teacher who still used an LC 575 and a blue G3 tower. There were a few LC III+ and Quadra 660 as well, but they weren't often used. The LC 575 and LC 5200 were still being used daily when I left middle school. The high school didn't have any Macs that I can recall, all Dells.
 
I have a Mac Pro also

and it is a powerhouse for sure.  Mine has dual 2 dual core Xeon processors, 16 GB RAM, and 4.5 TB of disk.  I'm currently running OS X 10.7.5 on it as the  host OS only because I can't upgrade any higher because Apple limited what model machines can run newer versions. Not because the machine is incapable of running it.  Worse is that when Apple releases a new OS version (be it iOS or OS X) they drop all support for previous versions.  They don't even provide security updates.  That means unless you are running a good virus detector, you are vulnerable.  However with the magic of VMware, I CAN and do run the newer versions in a VM (and you'd never know it was running in a VM). 
 
I definitely want a Mac Pro, I'm planning on saving up for one soon.

You can get a newer OS than 10.7 to install and run fine on the older Mac Pros. There's no real technical reason they can't other than Apple trying to outdated them.
 
The problem with the early Mac Pros

is that Apple built them with a 32 bit EFI that is incompatible with versions of OS X newer than Lion.  The machine is a true 64 bit machine, does run 64 bit software just fine.  Unfortunately there is no 64 bit upgrade for this EFI ROM, and even if there were, the chip is soldered to the board.  I did find a work around I'm gonna try on a spare disk this week-end.  It involves replacing the boot.efi files in the installer for Mavericks with a modified one, and disabling the hardware checker in the OS installation program.  It'll probably work, but when Apple releases a new level of the OS, it will probably replace the modified files and break the system.  Not good.  Just going to have to give it a try and see what happens.
 
I got a new MacBook Air last week, I love it so slim and lightweight and what struck me was that it's completely silent no fan noise. It's remarkably quick with a solid state hard drive too boots up in a few seconds, I have installed Windows 8.1 (takes some getting used to coming from Windows 7!!!) on it too with Boot Camp so I have the best of both worlds. I also have an original MacBook in Black that I got in 2008 it runs OS10.6 and XP Pro with Boot Camp and it is still going strong and I have an original Mac Mini G4 that I purchased around 2004 it's like a tank just keeps on going!!! Macs are expensive but in my opinion they last a very long time, my Dell XPS laptop that I got in 2010 needed a new motherboard and keyboard luckily it was still under warranty but when the faults occurred I'm about to give that to my parents now I have my new MacBook.
 
Well, I got the iBook G3 and I installed 10.4.11, and divided the drive so I could install OS 9. I'm posting this from the Classilla browser on OS 9.2.1 right now. Its a very diffeent and interesting OS from what I'm used to on a Mac, I barely remember using this backin elementary school.
 
I think the cutoff for OS 9 boot ability was in 2003. The mirrored drive doors PowerMac G4 kept it til it was discontinued. In OS 10.4.11 and older on PPC Macs you can run in "Classic Mode" which emulates OS 9 and runs most of its applications. You can download an emulator on Intel Macs to run it if you want.

I might have found a Mac Pro for $75 with a bad video card. Well see today if it works out.
 
If that is true, get it. Mac video cards are expensive, but if you have a PC with the correct video card connector, then you can flash the Mac bios to it....

Maybe I'm thinking PPC macs... Hopefully not.
 
Mac G3 and G4

We used to have the old Mac G3 and G4 all in one units for the art users and those were true workhorses.

But I have had not too good experience working with the A1181 and A1342 white Macbook laptops in my school district. I am the building tech so have to come up with fixes whenever these go sour. Common problems we have experienced are broken magnetic power connectors that were recalled on the early 1181's, to units that will not charge to locked up keyboards requiring PRAM resets to certain software incompatibilities with our Smartboards. Also annoying are the built in batteries on the 1342 models requiring Apple to change them out and the lack of USB ports. The interesting thing is that we have the same number of Mac laptops and Dell E6400 laptops being used by the same students and teachers. Both are of the 2008-2009 vintage. I now have a pile of 15 dead Macbook laptops whose cost to repair far exceeded there value and only one Dell that was dropped and smashed. Every other Dell is still in use with Windows 7 and still run reasonably well. I am impartial to either OS or company as they are both made in China and each have there pluses and minuses but the newer mac laptops just do not seem to hold up as well in daily use from what I can see.
 

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