pseydtonne | One extra life for a very old iBook

I am typing from a laptop computer that I bought used four or five years ago. It's an iBook G3, 500 MHz with 576 MB RAM. I found an Airport card for it and also had to replace the motherboard a few years ago. Once upon a time, this laptop was everything I could want in a portable office.

It used to be

lightfixer's machine. I was supposed to wipe it when i first bought it, but I never got around to it. I kept thinking "it's got Office for Mac and I don't want to go through the pain of finding that again".

This meant I left OS X.3 running well beyond its time. I also probably tossed a couple files I shouldn't've -- it's only got a 10 GB hard drive and it'd take about six hours of surgery to replace it. So it ground along, incapable of system updates until it got wiped.

I forgot about the machine for nearly a year, then got it a new battery and took it to Australia (where it saved my life). Then it got too old to render Google Maps easily, so it got buried again and didn't come with me to France.

Saturday night I was at

fangirl715's place looking at her iMac. It's short on RAM and needs to be upgraded. I wanted to do a test run of installing Tiger (OS X version 10.4) on a G3 before trying it on her machine, in case wicked weird things happened. Since I'd been debating doing the same thing to this crazy laptop, I had a place to do my dry run.

Last night I decided I was ready to give this laptop one last shot at life. I've always enjoyed typing on it, even though it'd become too slow to keep up with the typing if I wrote an LJ entry directly into the browser. Either it was going to run Tiger (10.5 won't run on a G3), run some Linux and become a terminal toy, or be tossed.

So I backed up everything, wiped the drive and installed from CDs. It took a while but it worked!

I won't lie to you and claim this machine is blazing -- it's from 2001, it can't play DVDs and takes half an hour to run an updater. However, I am typing in Safari 3.2.1 (a web browser) instead of writing my post from a text editor and pasting the results. The screen keeps up with the keyboard and Google Maps works relatively efficiently. Heck, it can even synchronize sound and video to show a Strong Bad email, which the old setup could never do.

This lightweight white slab got another year of life. Not everything old is being tossed. Now i need to schedule when

fangirl715 would like me to come over and do the scary stuff to her old machine.

Sometimes radical surgery is the solution.

-so stand up, Dante