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Making the best of older Macs

Monday, April 21, 2008 / Hardware, Intel Macs, Mac OS X, Software

Someone recently gave me a G3 desktop and a Power PC desktop.

These machines are old but still working.

I don`t want to toss them out if something can be done with them… the 7300/2000 seems to be running the best (faster) it has 385 mb of memory installed; how much could I max the RAM out to? And will the RAM from the G3 fit ?

I have fond memories of both beige systems. In theory, the G3 Desktop should be faster than the 7300/200 Power Mac. It’s possible that the 7300 had a processor upgrade over the years. That could easily make it faster than an un-upgraded G3 Desktop. Look at the System Profiler under the Apple menu to see what processor speed you have.

The 7300 could support 1GB of RAM via 8 128MB chips. It is probably OK to aim instead for 512MB via 8 64MB chips.
http://www.powermax.com/parts/show/r-d-64

This RAM for the 7300 is different than the RAM in the G3 Desktop. The beige G3 Power Macs used PC66 SDRAM and would only support 768MB total RAM via 3 256MB chips.
http://www.powermax.com/parts/show/r-g3-256

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