I have an Imac DV and I would like to know which mac model would make the best "slave" machine for my Imac, what I mean is that I would like to get an old and cheap mac to connect to Imac to carry out the slow basic things like printing and connecting to the internet etc.
thanks for any help

Kali

Grape Imac DV 400 256MB os 9 40 Gig HD

[TazmanDman]

I'm not sure what to tell you, except that you should get a mac with built-in ethernet, which shouldn't be hard to find. You can probably find a good deal on deal-mac.com for a cheapy mac, but why would you want to get another mac if your imac does everything you need anyways?

-taz

[jeromep]

Sounds more like you want a small server for your personal needs. I'm not sure why you are trying to offload printing; as printing on the Mac is typically done from the local machine and not handed off to a server. The full Appleshare package can do print serving, but since most network printers can stand along on a network there is little need for you to have a machine to act as a print server.

Let's assume you want a home server. You only need a few basic things.

1. Ethernet
2. Disk space

Just for convenience purposes, I wouldn't suggest any Mac lower than a PowerMac 7100. It has all the basic pieces for making a good personal server. It has onboard Ethernet, via an AAUI cable adapter and it has SCSI disk, so you can get a reasonably good sized disk that has reasonably good response times.

Anything lower than that and you are going to be patching up an old machine to make your project work and anything too much younger and you are probably paying too much.

Try a Performa 62xx. Get ANY 72-pin SIMMs for RAM, make sure you have a comm slot ethernet card, and then you can put a big, cheap IDE hard drive in it and it will work great. That's my strategy.

[jeromep]

I can't agree with getting a 62xx series machine. The overall architecture of the system is very poor and the disk response will be even worse. Plus, you now have to invest in a CommSlot Ethernet card rather than getting a less expensive AAUI adapter. Overall your costs will be a wash, but the 7100 was seriously great hardware and will be a better server. The point of having a personal server is to throw data around and the 62xx is now known for good data transfer raters between onboard devices.

Thanx for all the great replys, this at the moment is just an idea I have been kicking around as I had my (Spit) Pc home system networked to gether and it was great to be able 'off load' tasks to another machine and still do processor intencive stuff.

Kali

I, Mac

[jeromep]

Not to keep the post alive long after it has been useful, but I just want to make sure that you understand the bennifit of a local, personal server.

It appears that you used PCs before and were handing off tasks to them, especially printing, which I will admit that at times, rare times, I have been impressed with the onboard printer sharing of Windows, but...

If you have a rather current Mac, I don't see a great bennifit to trying to offload tasks such as printing. A personal Mac server is much better at storing data in a central location than dealing with the offloading of tasks.

Anything you want to add to this, Kali?