got a guy who wants to trade me this laptop, plus cash.

Quote :

"G4 Apple Powerbook 690 17" monitor and I think 80 gb harddrive has tons of software on it. OSX 10.01"

im lookin for a laptop, was going to buy one, but i figured id trade some of my stuff off for a laptop.

i know its like 3-4 years old. but whats the news on these?
thanks

12/2/2008 5:46:28 PM

it's pretty old...

depends on the value of the stuff you're trading and the cash

i wouldn't pay more than around $300-$350 for that machine

12/2/2008 5:53:28 PM

wow.. thats good i guess. the guy wanted to throw $170 cash on top of it.

im trading him a scooter. i mean, its def worth a few hundred..

hes affiliated with a college, so the laptop may have been free..

either way.. it may be a good deal even without the cash.
i know nothing about macs. during my google searches i found OS X 10.2 or something.

is it like windows where i can upgrade for a price?

[Edited on December 2, 2008 at 5:59 PM. Reason : ]

12/2/2008 5:58:21 PM

facepalm

12/2/2008 6:01:16 PM

yeah

os x 10.1 is old as shit

you'll want to go to at least 10.4, i'm not sure if leopard (10.5) will run very well on there, it's barely usable on my G5 at work with 8 gigs of ram...

10.4 is readily available on various torrent sites

just know that this laptop is basically four generations behind cpu-wise (g5, then core duo, then core 2 duo 65nm, then core 2 duo 45nm) and won't do a lot of the cool things the intel macs can do (bootcamp, parallels/vmware fusion, etc)

12/2/2008 6:02:25 PM

THat laptop is going to be slow.

And it potentially won't be able to run the next version of OS X (and DEFINITELY won't run the one AFTER the next version).

If you really don't need and use the scooter, it wouldn't be a bad trade for you though, if you don't mind not being able to play HD videos (or hulu videos even) without stuttering.

That laptop though, assuming it has more than 1GB of RAM, would be perfectly fine for web browsing, word processing, emailing, etc., and you can even play really old Mac games like Oregon Trail natively if you wanted to.

12/2/2008 6:35:10 PM

it really depends on the processor in it.

i have a 4 year old powerbook G4 1.5Ghz 17" that's still my daily driver. it runs leopard fine.

12/2/2008 7:33:15 PM

^ I have the same exact computer, and i've been very disappointed with its Leopard performance. I have 1.5GB of RAM in it too. It's easily usable for anything that doesn't involve HD or flash-based video (but DivXs etc work perfectly fine).

I may be spoiled though by my quad-core Hackintosh with the 8800GT.

12/2/2008 8:20:21 PM

yeah, i have a dual core g5 at work with 8 gigs of ram, it runs leopard, but it's noticeably slower than my first gen macbook pro

12/2/2008 8:52:59 PM

not worth it. non-Intel Mac's have all but officially died. Most new software doesn't and won't support non-Intel Macs. After next year, no new Apple software will either.

12/2/2008 9:21:38 PM

just put Gentoo on it, pretty much everything compiles on ppc

12/2/2008 9:23:48 PM

if you've never used Mac before, this would be a terrible introduction for you

12/2/2008 10:28:40 PM

^good to know, along with all of the other advice in here.

ive used them in a sense that when im at a friends house and want to use a computer, its a mac laptop. but ive never gotten comfy with one.

i was afraid if i go through with this, it would make me hate apples.

thanks folks.

[Edited on December 3, 2008 at 1:00 AM. Reason : ]

12/3/2008 12:59:49 AM

its a mac, don't buy it

12/3/2008 1:21:15 AM

Quote :

"I have the same exact computer, and i've been very disappointed with its Leopard performance. I have 1.5GB of RAM in it too. It's easily usable for anything that doesn't involve HD or flash-based video (but DivXs etc work perfectly fine). I may be spoiled though by my quad-core Hackintosh with the 8800GT."

yeah, i originally had 1G of RAM and leopard ran like shit on it. I upgraded to 2GB of RAM and it runs much better now. And you're right, it can't handle HD video at all.

I really really really really want an MBPro, but i don't have $3g's to spend on a work computer.
our VP will not allow us to get macs anymore so i'm trying to stretch my powerbook as far as I can.

12/3/2008 7:35:16 AM

^

Quote :

"our VP will not allow us to get macs anymore"

whys that

12/3/2008 10:40:15 PM

some sort of personal vendetta from what I understand.

12/4/2008 8:39:59 AM