I've got a Beige Power Mac G3. Everything is stock except for the USB/FireWire combo card that I added and VGA adapter. Currently, when I want to use the Mac, I use my KVM to pass the video to my monitor. I still have to use the ADB(?) mouse and keyboard instead of my Wintel PS/2 keyboard and mouse. I bought a PS/2 to USB adapter, but that really doesn't work (the keyboard is flakey and the mouse doesn't move). I would like to know if there is a device that would allow me to connect my PS/2 devices to the single ADB port.

I would also like to try OSX on this thing. How well (or badly) will it perform? Also, before I do OSX, I would probably want to upgrade the hard drive (SCSI). While in MacOS 9.2, how would I go about transferring the contents of the old drive and making the new one bootable (I would dump the old drive)?

Thanks for the advice. While I think Win2k and (to a lesser extent) WinXP are good, I have an urge to get away from Windows before it gets worse. I am reasonably experienced with Linux, so I don't want to hear anyone saying I should just use that. Mac has been around for too long and I know NOTHING about it. The fact that I can't switch between my PC and Mac easily is holding me back. Also, if anyone has recommendations for hardware upgrades, I am open to that too. Thanks.

I'm not sure about ADB to PS/2 converters, as my recent experience with Macs has all been with USB based ones.

OS X is going to be dog slow on that box, assuming it's still at it's sub 300mhz speed. The more the memory, the better. Also, if you have a Quartz Extreme supported card for video, that might help under 10.2 (as there are ways to enable this even on PCI cards.) As far as drive space, you need a good chunk free to play with X. Apple recommends about 3gb of free space to complete the install. And as far as hard drive upgrades, the page you linked to indicates the system uses an IDE drive...

G3 and G4 upgrades are available for your box. G4 upgrades will result in many Apple programs seeing a boost from the Altivec engine, but it may also lead to a patch needed to load OS X as well.

the page you linked to indicates the system uses an IDE drive...

You're right. I just looked and the CD-ROM is the SCSI device. How moronic.

I was reading about the patching before loading OSX. What happens if I want to upgrade my CPU after OSX is installed?

You're right. I just looked and the CD-ROM is the SCSI device. How moronic.

Apple was a big believer in SCSI long ago, and I suppose they probably had a ton of SCSI CD-Rom drives still around. Who knows.

I was reading about the patching before loading OSX. What happens if I want to upgrade my CPU after OSX is installed?

That I'm not sure. I believe the patch is to get the installer to support the system, so if OS X is already up and running, it may not be needed at all.

belkin used to sell a ps2 to adb adaptor that would work with their omniview kvm's. I haven't looked to see if they still have it.

could you use a usb kvm and get a usb keyboard and mouse.

Link

Thanks! Thats exactly what I wanted.
It's only $60 from PC Mall.

Post how it works I was considering getting one to use for my old mac.

Using Quartz Extreme on an old system is a mixed bag.. it speeds up stuff under light load but saturates the (66MHz, in your case) bus and slows things down with heavier use.

I'd call 10.2 "tolerable" on my beige 266 if you've got reasonable expectations for a 5 year old system. Mine mostly just gets used as a file server/place to connect HDs nowadays though. As Drakino said, stuff all the RAM you can in it.. if it's a desktop, take that literally; you can coerce not-quite-low-profile DIMMs to fit in there if needed.

Kinesis used to do Mac ADB adapters for their PC keyboards and foot mice.