Mac Price Help!!!!!!!

[Crisp_Rapper]

Looking at buying a Mac on ebay and am not sure of the price I should pay.

Apple iBook, G3 700MHz. 384Mb of memory,and a massive 60 GB hard drive, 14 inch screen and Combo drive. It's loaded with OSX 10.4 (the latest operating system around). The iBook is in excellent condition and comes with orginal box Beautifully designed casing 384 MB RAM A massive 60GB Hard Disk

How much is a good price?

[segages]

Hmm it's difficult since the new Intel Macs are just out, PowerPC Macs can be had cheap now. Eg, I recently sold a 1.2GHz iBook G4 for just over ?400. I'd say that G3 is probably worth ?170-?200 (private sale-eBay price).

Some things to bear in mind:

The battery is probably on the way out. I would ask how old it is, how long it can hold a charge and how many cycles it has done (there are programs on versiontracker.com you can get to check).

384mb RAM is OK for running Jaguar (10.2) and maybe Panther (10.3) but is too little for anything other than browsing, email, light office stuff on Tiger (10.4). You're in virtual memory land not long after booting up, and this is (I'm guessing) on a 4200rpm drive.

TBH, I wouldn't go lower than a G4. I felt my old iBook getting bogged down but if you want a cheap laptop for basic stuff, it's probably OK. You should be able to get a G4 class machine 800MHz and upwards for not much more. Depends on what you need it for though.

The main thing to check up on, for any laptop, is the battery life. If you're planning on using it plugged in all the time, this isn't a bother.

[ascender]

First thing I thought while reading that was that "its a bit light on the RAM". I'd definitely factor that in when making a bid, check out Crucial and see how much it will cost you to put more RAM in.

[SubparMario]

?150? That's a really slow machine.

[Crisp_Rapper]

acquired another better specced lappy... 1.5ghz, 1gig ram 60gig hdd. it's for my girlfriend to learn some crappy mac specific proggy called quark. it also means i can learn how to use a mac (i find them amazingly frustrating coming from a purely pc background).

cheers chaps.