[waffffffle]

I've never owned a PowerMac. My history is LCII, Performa 6400, PowerBook 5300ce iMac rev B, Pismo 400, iBook SE, iBook 500. I don't really have any experience with buying components and third party parts for a PowerMac. I am a student ADC member and I would like to use my one-time hardware discount on a 1GHz tower. I would like to save as much money as possible by buying additional RAM, hard drives, and optical drives from other sources. I would like to know the following:

Can I buy an internal superdrive from somewhere else? Will it work in my PowerMac? Can I then move the stock combo drive to the lower drive bay?

Is ramseeker.com still the best place to find cheap RAM? Even for PowerMacs?

Is there anything I need to know about buying additional hard drives? Can I just take any 3.5 inch IDE drive and just stick it in there? How many bays are there?

Thanks.

[waffffffle]

Also, can I possibly add one of those really fast 52X IDE CD burners off of ebay?

[geekwagon]

Originally posted by waffffffle:
Also, can I possibly add one of those really fast 52X IDE CD burners off of ebay?

Most drives will work in the second bay of the MDD's, although you usually have to pull the face off the tray that sticks out. On most drives that is really easy. The other thing to be concerned about is whether there are drivers in iTunes to burn audio cd's. You can check the drive compatibility database at www.xlr8yourmac.com for that.

I would really recommend that you try to get one of the dual proc machines if you can possibly swing it. I had a dual 867 powermac (now a 1.25) and a single 867 powerbook and while they are both awesome, the dual is just sooo much smoother in OSX.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, you can get a superdrive from lots of places. Lots of the generic dvd-r drives actually contain the Pioneer mechanisms that Apple uses. I bought one packaged by Cendyne which is a Pioneer DVR-105 (which is the new 4x superdrive.) I paid $220 for it at Fry's. I see them for similar prices at office max and online all the time. And yes, you can move your combo drive to the lower bay, and you will want to because it is much faster at reading than the superdrive is.

Any 3.5" IDE disk will work. The MDD holds 4 drives. I bought my ram from crucial, 512mb for $110 shipped as I recall.

[derekn]

For best prices on RAM you may want to try generic from a place like OWC. Their 512meg PC2100 DIMM is about $60 I believe. For the latest prices on those you can check out dealram.com or price watch, only problem with price watch however is that you won't know if the DIMM will work in a Mac or not.

Hard drive wise it's like geekwagon said, I have 3 of the 4 bays in my dual 867 filled. The stock IBM 60 gig drive, a WD 80 Special edition and a Maxtor 80 gig fluid bearing drive. All work fine. All you do is make sure the jumpers are set to Cable Select, plug them in and you're off. Another way to save money with those is to either check for deals (on dealmac.com) or find places that sell the OEM versions of the drives instead of the boxed retail ones. The OEM will just have the drive in an anti-static bag with no documentation, mounting kit etc but the drive itself is the same.

[DBvader]

boy, i bought my Dual 867 with student ADC, id hate for you to only get a 1giggy with that. look at the Dual 1.2 at least

[aaanorton]

Originally posted by waffffffle:
Also, can I possibly add one of those really fast 52X IDE CD burners off of ebay?

I just ordered one of these from LaCie. It's a refurb unit, but I've had great experience with LaCie. It will be a Lite-On 52x CD-RW and I spent 99 bucks for it.

[DrBoar]

If you can hang on for 6 months or so and get a SP 970 instead od the lame G4. I moved to new work adn bought a dual 1.25. The only reason was that the other option was to use a 7300/200!The current SP G4 looks relly lame, substantially slower than the dual 867 it replaced. Even if there was a price drop it does not look like a good deal.
The dual 1.25 is OK and will work for several years for email, webbrowsing and Office but someting like a Sp 1 GHz G4 will show its age much sooner.
wake me with a hot 970

[keston]

Get what you need/can afford NOW. Or in 6 months, no doubt you will be presented with yet another reason to wait 6 months...
I made the mistake of doing that. I recently bought a G4 DP1.25Ghz, after a 1.5-2yr period of "waiting" for the next best thing coming .

[Rodster]

Originally posted by DrBoar:
If you can hang on for 6 months or so and get a SP 970 instead od the lame G4. I moved to new work adn bought a dual 1.25. The only reason was that the other option was to use a 7300/200!The current SP G4 looks relly lame, substantially slower than the dual 867 it replaced. Even if there was a price drop it does not look like a good deal.
The dual 1.25 is OK and will work for several years for email, webbrowsing and Office but someting like a Sp 1 GHz G4 will show its age much sooner.
wake me with a hot 970

I gotta agree with this. I was going to buy a dual 1.25 last Monday and for some reason I couldn't pull the trigger. Then last week news broke about Panther, and other speculation as to why Apple move the conference date. At that moment I decided to hold off on my purchase and wait and see what's coming hardware and software wise.

My suggestion is if you can wait see what Apple unveils in San Francisco this June.