Freebie of the Year: PowerBook G4 TiBook

[nickdalzell]

gotta love things you find while out on vacation. this one was a nice find, a free Apple PowerBook G4 TiBook. Lucky find when i was wondering how to replace the Chromebook with its buggy and overheat-happy Ubuntu with something more familiar with the MacBook Pro (but something i can use each day without worry of breaking it or getting my greasy fingers on it after dinner) with the stability of it.

It's extremely low on spec (400MHz PowerPC, 128MB of SDRAM, 8GB ATA HDD, Mac OS X Panther) but i managed to hack my way to speed, with iCab 4, and some system config tweaks.

Works fine, it won't do YouTube, but it does do iTunes streaming of Mad Mike's Radio fine, it browses AF and other sites with decent speed, and even the battery still holds decent charge (has a spare too, but haven't tested it yet).

13 years-old and still holding a charge? it bears a remarkable resemblence to the Pro even though it's that old. Apple sure knows how to make a machine that ages well!



I've always wanted to find one other laptop, the clamshell iBook. those always looked neat to me.

 

[mikedt]

Now I thought mine was the freebie of the year and acquired while on vacation, a free Apple Macbook. 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 250GB HDD, OS X Snow Leopard and runs all the modern software I require. Now 6 years old and the battery is still holding a full charge.

 

[kate]

Where are you two going on vacation?

I need to book a trip

 

[mikedt]

Weston-Super-Mare, United Kingdom.

TBH I was my father who gave me the Macbook. He wasn't using it, he's got a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 now, and is very happy with it and is all he needs for what he does.

 

[nickdalzell]

i just tried to force-crash the laptop (loading YouTube) and despite the 128MB of RAM and 400MHz CPU, and Flash 9, it plays! only stable browser though is Camino, others are just laggy and then all i get is a chattering hard disk and the spinning ball of death.

 

[mikedt]

i just tried to force-crash the laptop (loading YouTube) and despite the 128MB of RAM and 400MHz CPU, and Flash 9, it plays! only stable browser though is Camino, others are just laggy and then all i get is a chattering hard disk and the spinning ball of death.

I'm not entirely surprised TBH. 128MB RAM was barely enough for just Win XP in 2001, never mind trying to do any productivity...yeh lagging, constantly chattering HDD and the spinning hour glass. Chrome for Linux as I'm looking at it now is consuming 190MB, just for itself.

What version of Camino you using? It's only just been discontinued this year, and probably has similar RAM requirements as Firefox or Chrome.

 

[nickdalzell]

Camino 0.8.6, the only Panther-supported version. compared with the rest i attempted to use (Netscape 9, iCab 4, Safari, Firefox 2.0) it seems VERY speedy and never lags. it never gives the beach ball of death. no swapping to disk. even has support for YouTube (played a few videos and they played as good as they would on the MacBook Pro!) and installed a later copy of VLC Player and used it to play my internet radio stream (iTunes suddenly developed a 'rebuffering' loop problem) it's like my days in Windows 98, have to find third-party apps to work around the unsupported nature of the OS and machine, but it makes an excellent daily driver. i keep the Pro for more serious use (games and such) and only use it on the go, this one is just a home machine for use when i come home from work with greasy fingers and often sits on the couch. i'm not risking my Pro falling off, being licked by my dog, deer, or having its keys rubbed off by my greasy fingers.

 

[mikedt]

Camino 0.8.6, the only Panther-supported version.

That'll be PowerPC only that one. It won't even run on my Intel Mac with Snow Leopard, as Apple removed PowerPC compatibility and emulation(Rosetta) with OS X 10.6