How to choose a new Second-hand Mac

In the last few weeks my computing experience has been completely changed. I have switched to Mac. So far i am enjoying the change and am glad i made it. But what about the people out there that can't afford a brand new Macintosh but want to give Mac a try? Well then there's eBay, and the exciting world of used Macs.

My first ever Macintosh (and all that have followed) have been purchased from eBay. I however made some crucial mistakes when buying my first ever Mac and want to help people to make the right decisions when buying a new Used Mac.

The main feature of the Mac is the operating system, and to have a positive computing experience on any platform, you need to have hardware that will run the operating system properly, i.e. Without crashes, SBBODs (Spinning Beach Ball of Death) and BSODs. And of course you have to have hardware that will run the OS at a reasonable and hopefully fast pace.

This was where i made my first wrong decision when buying my first Macintosh computer. The first Mac that i bought was an iMac G3 (400MHz Indigo) and it did not run OS X at all well. I faced problems everyday such as SBBODs, startup problems (no spinner) and general lack of performance. Not surprising since the iMac G3 was designed and shipped with Mac OS 9.

So my recommendation to buyers of Used Macs is to never, ever buy a G3 system with the hope of using it as a main machine. G3s were never designed for OS X and in my opinion to run OS X properly you should have a G4. My reasoning is this - G4 systems i.e. The PowerMac G4, G4 Cube, iMac G4 e.t.c will always come with better specs than the G3s. The one exception to this may be the PowerMac G3 as this particular system came with 16MB VRAM compared to the 8MB on most but not all iMac G3s. To stay on the safe side for a less technical user i would recommend a G4 or above.

My next Mac was an eMac G4 (1.42GHz, 1GB RAM) which had enough power and VRAM to run the OS a lot better. So from my experience i learned that never should you trust an iMac G3 as a main system. They may look very nice, but they certainly don't run OS X well at all. I hope you enjoyed my bit on choosing a second hand mac.

Comments

[hola]

Wait so you can't even run Mac OS X Cheetah? Puma? Jaguar? How do you use such an old operating system? And by the way, I don't reccomend you get the eMac. I had experience with these things and they are just terrible. very slow, not very responsive and break very easily (trust me!) Why don't you try an old G4 PowerMac or the iMac G4. They can sell for as little as 300$ for a "like new" on Ebay.

[Matthew Cooper]

Thanks for the comment. Regarding old OSes, you can run OS X on any Mac from the iMac G3 upwards. What i meant was that they were very slow, buggy OS X machines and i would not recommend them for everyday use. I have found my eMac to be very good although i did choose the top of the line 1.42GHz model and am now using it quite comfortably as a main machine. Trying a PowerMac G4? Wait and see.

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