My Pismo Has Been Resurrected
- May 23, 2007
- 1 comment
I have been wanting a way to do work without being tied to my iMac all the time. A few weeks ago, I was perusing the MacBooks in the Apple Store here in Austin. I like the look and feel of them, but I can’t justify spending $1200+ just so I can work away from the office every now and then.
Several days ago, while I was thinking about checking out deals on used MacBooks, it dawned on me. I already had a laptop. My trusty, old Pismo Powerbook was sitting collecting dust in my closet. Sure, it’s seven years old now, and hasn’t been touched in the last three or four years, but it should be able to do the job with a few upgrades.
I got the Powerbook out of my closet, plugged everything in and hit the power button. Nothing. I checked the power supply and cable again and everything looked fine. Of course, the battery was empty having sat there for years, so I decided to leave it plugged in and let it charge overnight to see if it would magically start up later.
The next morning the battery still showed empty, but when I pushed the power button, it booted up! I had forgotten that I had installed Mandrake Linux on it before I put it in storage. I wiped Mandrake and reinstalled OS X. The Powerbook ran it, but it was slow. Of course it only has a 400 MHz G3, 256 MB RAM and a 10 GB drive. Not exactly a powerhouse. I decided I would do some research and see how much it would cost to upgrade it just enough to work with a handful of apps I would need to still get work done, like TextMate, Transmit, iRatchet, Firefox w/ Firebug and a few others.
I figured I would leave the CPU alone for now since that would easily be the most expensive part to upgrade. I knew the battery would have to be replaced since it was dead. I also decided to upgrade the hard drive and RAM as well as get a wireless card for it. After searching around, I ended up buying from three places: Tiger Direct for an Hitachi 80 GB hard drive, Other World Computing for 1 GB RAM and a new, higher capacity battery, and amazingly Best Buy for the wireless card.
The card I got is the Motorola WN825G. I chose this one because it uses the same chipset as the Apple Airport wireless cards, so OS X doesn’t need to install drivers to use it. Just pop it in, and OS X automatically starts using it. It was a cinch to connect to my network, and it’s quite snappy with the download speeds.
Overall, it was really easy to upgrade everything. The battery and wireless card were simply a matter of sliding them in. And the Pismo is built to allow easy access to the hard drive, RAM and CPU from the top. The bottom RAM slot was a little tricky to get to since I was missing a little plastic tab that helps you pull the daughtercard away from the motherboard. I ended up using an old credit card to pop it loose. Other than that, it was a breeze and took maybe 20 - 30 minutes altogether.
With the upgrades in place, OS X is definitely snappier. I’ve also disabled all the eye-candy since I don’t need it to get work done. It runs all the apps I need quite well. Of course, it’s noticeably slower than my much newer iMac, but at least it will let me work from other places besides my office. The speed decrease is worth it. I still do most of my work on my iMac, but it’s nice to know I can do work elsewhere when I feel like it.
Forgot to mention that I’ve named the laptop Lazarus. Seems fitting.
lol! That’s awesome Chris.