iBook adventure

Captain_Slick

Captain_Slick

Captain_Slick

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Joined
30 Nov 2003
Posts
2,211
Hi guys! I recently bought an iBook of eBay.

It's a G3 Firewire model.

Specs: PowerPC 600Mhz - 512kb L2 Cache
256Mb SD RAM (128Mb onboard + 128Mb SD RAM SODIMM)
16Mb ATi onboard graphics
CD-ROM
10GB HDD
Airport 802.11b card
12.1" LCD

It's come with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar installed. Whilst this is fine and dandy, it's a bit slow, a bit buggy, and not very good for getting the most out of it. The person I bought it from had originally upgrading from Jaguar to Tiger, and actually found that it ran Tiger much faster than Jaguar (I'm guessing Tiger is much better optimised than previous versions), so I'm going to upgrade to Tiger, but give it a bit more beef whilst I'm at it.

So here's my master plan:

Replace 128Mb SD RAM SODIMM with 256Mb or 512Mb depending on how much I can get each for.

Replace CD-ROM with Slimline DVD-RW.

Replace 10GB HDD with Western Digital Scorpio 120GB IDE 2.5" HDD.

Install Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

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Any help or tips would be greatly appreciated! Cheers guys!
 
Sorry but for £170 I can't help thinking you got ripped. That is, while quite good for the novelty factor, a very slow old Mac. Buying any quantity of SD-RAM and a DVD burner is going to push it over £300. I just don't think it's worth it.
 
I fail to see how I got ripped off when most second hand Mac's go for much more than that... :confused:

Also, I've already priced the other parts, and they come to the great sum of £90 total. So, we're talking £270 total, tops. You'd be hard pressed to get an early G4 iBook with a combo drive and sizeable hard drive for that much.

sid said:
the Bios might not recognize dvdrw or the larger hdd, be warned

sid
Click to expand...


What BIOS? :p
 
Captain_Slick said:
I fail to see how I got ripped off when most second hand Mac's go for much more than that... :confused:

Also, I've already priced the other parts, and they come to the great sum of £90 total. So, we're talking £270 total, tops. You'd be hard pressed to get an early G4 iBook with a combo drive and sizeable hard drive for that much.




What BIOS? :p
Click to expand...

EFi or whatever but make sure it will work with newer drives
 
Captain_Slick said:
I fail to see how I got ripped off when most second hand Mac's go for much more than that... :confused:
Click to expand...
Most second hand Macs are quicker than that as well. Maybe ripped off was the wrong way of putting it, but the price of old Macs doesn't do buyers any favours. I'm sure it will be a great little project but it's still a 600MHz G3. At the end of it all you'll have spent £300 on a computer that you can just about browse websites and type letters on.
sid said:
EFi or whatever but make sure it will work with newer drives
Click to expand...
Open Firmware
 
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You guys have never used a 600Mhz G3, clearly. It's spec belies it's perfomance.

Hell, I'm sat here right now typing on it. It's running 10.2 sure, but it's also running Firefox, iTunes, and Photoshop, all at the same time and remarkably well too. I swear it only takes 2-5 seconds to open a large BMP in photoshop. So it's hardly just a machine that can 'just about' be used browsing and letter writing. I'm editing a couple of photos I took earlier today on it at the moment, and that's what I wanted it for. Something I can take away with me when me and the family go on holiday. It's small enough and light enough, whilst still remarkably capable. It's brilliant. The larger hard drive, extra RAM and dvd-rw will only make it more useful.

The buyer I bought it off tells me it runs faster under 10.4 than it does under 10.2 as well, so that can only be a good thing.

It's just as quick as my sisters 2.8Ghz Celeron Laptop under XP as well, if not faster.

Sure, a £280 G4 model would probably be a lot faster (Or smoother, rather, since this is fast enough for me at the moment), but then I'd still have to spend £90 to improve it.

Seriously, it isn't as slow as you guys might think.
 
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I think you got ripped off.

I sold my Macbook G4 (1.2ghz, 40gb hdd) with 1.5mb ram, case all in Mint condition with box and manual for £400 last year.

with all the upgrade your pushing around £300 and it is considerably old and slow!
 
Yeah, you will find 10.3 and 10.4 faster than 10.2... I don't know if it is placebo, but that is the received wisdom. All the PPC machines showed this, as they removed the debug code from Mac OS X, and Apple were forced to optimise as the chip speed IBM offered stagnated.

I personally love the snow iBook keyboard. You got a firewire model as well which keeps the usefulness in the £150s as far as I am concerned. Did you get wifi? I wouldn't bother with the internal drive, just get a firewire external, or rip any DVDs you want with the relatively monster HDD you want in it!
 
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Yeah, only 802.11b though.

Shame that it's a proprietary slot, other wise I'd slap a 802.11g card in there as well. Isn't too slow though. Was downloading some programs last night at 400kb/s whilst I sat downstairs and watched QI. Wireless is fun!
 
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