a word about the G3 blue and white

yeah so my somewhat limited experience seems to indicate that G3s may be somewhat unstable, especially the blue and whites. random crashing and disk corruption. Also, some blue and whites had a bug in the IDE controller that would randomly corrupt data, but only manifested it's self if a 3rd party hard drive was installed. my recommendation is if you are looking at running an older mac, get a G4. they are pretty damn cheap on ebay right now.

so I got my g4 off of ebay. the son of a bitch that sold it to me lied about the specs, so I got a real stripped down machine.. no video card, no memory, no scsi or IDE card... although there are two onboard IDE ports. fortunately I have all that shit left over from the blue and white. so I filed a dispute with paypal hopefully I will get some of my money back. Oh well for like under $75 including shipping it ain't a huge loss anyway. Still it would have been nice to get a computer that already has this shit in it right.

it came with an 18GB scsi hard drive in it so I am going to hook that up and see if I can find any files from the previous owner. that is always fun. it is kind of a voyeuristic sort of thing to do, but also I am like, hey, maybe the previous owner might like his files back. you never know under what circumstances someone separates with their computer. maybe they weren't planning on it or it got stolen or they were in prison or who knows.

so the hard drive, get this, has that funky 68 pin tiny tiny sorta scsi connector. fortunately I have a SCSI card that has BOTH a 68pin and a 50 pin connector on it.... that scsi card won't work in this computer I'm sure, but no big deal, I can use the scsi card as an adapter... run a 68 pin cable from the drive to the card, and then a 50 pin from the card to the other scsi card of the computer. just leave the 68/50 card sorta sitting on the desk or whatever.

anyway, I needa get a mac up and running so I can pull all my mac files off of these drives and put them on a linux system. I am looking forward to the ext3 file system. both the old Windows FAT and Mac file systems were so shitty I can't begin to tell you...