I picked up one of these the other day. It’s a pretty little thing and appears to be in perfect condition. It’s a 500 mhz unit with a 20 gig drive and 128 megs RAM and a CDRW drive. It’ was apparently owned by a college kid as it’s got lots of term papers and music on it. It’s running OS 9.2…something)
I don’t know Apple OS’s from Swahili, but with some fiddling I was able to get it to burn a disk with the itunes app and some OS burner applet.
128 RAM/20 gig drive/500mhz CPU in the Windows world is pretty feeble. Is it any more useful on an iMac? Is this thing too far behind the curve to do useful stuff for most (current) college kids?
Until recently I was using an orange ibook for most everything and running perhaps 10.2 on it (whatever was a couple of upgrades back) and it worked fine. It would be fine to work on and do e-mail and basic webbrowsing without heavy flash stuff. As long as the student’s not doing graphic design or anything huge. No Doom II, either. Probably will run Fallout II, though.
Processor is sufficient. Feed it some more RAM, though, unless you’re going to use it for MacOS 9 instead of MacOS X.
“Useful vs. doorstop” is a question unresolvable without some sense of what you want to do with it. If all you need is to be able to send and receive email, write term papers in a word processor, create spreadsheets to balance your budget, and post to the Straight Dope, you can make do with a much much older Mac than that. If you need to edit feature-length movies in Final Cut Pro and burn the results to DVD, you’re way out of this machine’s league.
I’d be pretty grumpy with it as a main machine, but it’d make a great second machine (not uncommon among college students these days) to keep in the living room for web browsing, MP3 serving and guest use.