I just bought an iMac G3 to test out, its going to be the first of many older macs that I test for the site. The goal is to establish the real value of these older Apple computers. Another aspect of this project is to determine the best software to run on each machine.

This iMac is a G3 running at 400mhz and has 384 megs of ram. It came installed with OS 9 but I upgraded it to the lastest version of Tiger 10.4.11. This did involve upgrading to 9.1 and updating the firmware first. So far I have used the latest versions of Safari and Firefox 3, Marsedit, BBedit, and 1password. All of these ran very well, in fact everything but the browsers ran the same as they do on my newer Intel based Mac. The browsers aren’t as fast but still very usable and stable. The performance of the software combination above makes the G3 iMac an excellent blogging solution.

Another test I ran was to edit a video. I recorded the video with my iPhone using Cycorder and edited it with iMovie 3, which is now available for free from Apple. The video editing also went really smooth with no crashes and the old thing that takes some time is exporting the final product. I have included the video below, and check back later for some more tests on this and other older Macs.