Pismo and No Clam Shells Please
It has been a long slow sojurn to getting an inexpensive Apple laptop.
I am going to be helping at LosCon in November (for those of you not in SF or into SF but not living in Los Angeles, LosCon is the annual convention put on by the oldest science fiction club in the USA, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society or the LASFS [lahs-fuss]) and I figured it would be nice to have a computer this time. I did have a Powerbook 5300CS, but it was so slow and dodgy running OS 8 that I sold it to a lady who would use it to write scripts.
My goal was to spend no more than $500. In fact, if it was $300 that would be even better. You have to understand, Apple Powerbooks tend to last longer than their PC counterparts and since there are less of them out there, they tend to become commodity items. It is not uncommon to find PB 3400C laptops going from $150 and up. These are close to 8 years old and they can command these prices EVEN THOUGH THEY CAN’T RUN MAC OS X!
In fact, that was the cut off. It must be able to run some version of Mac OS X. So I looked long and hard and found a nice Powerbook G3 with the bronze keyboard (codenamed Lombard); this was the first of the “New World” Powerbooks, one that ran Mac OS from a software ROM, not a physical ROM on the motherboard. These were realeased in 1999 and are a very well built computer with a beautiful 14.1 inch active matrix screen. This one was also well upgraded, having a 40 GB hard drive, 320 MB of RAM and a hot swappable 250 MB ZIp drive. The guy who sold it to me kept the CD/DVD drive for another computer. I ended up purchasing a DVD movie decoder card and a CD/DVD drive later. Once I got that, I was able to install OS X, version 10.3.9 and it runs very well. However…
The Lombard has no Firewire ports. I consider Firewire an essential port; I think all computers should have at least one and if you don’t have any, add them. Unlike later iBooks, the Lombard has a Cardbus slot, so I could have added a FW card, but that still omits two important Macintosh features; the ability to boot from an external FW drive and FW target disk mode. Basically this means you can put your computer into what I call the “Firewire trance” and use it exactly like an external hard drive. This is a great feature if you have no removable storage and no ethernet cable, also, it is faster than either of those at moving data.
This would be the next iteration of the Powerbook G3, codenamed Pismo. If I could find a Pismo with at least 256 MB of RAM, I could do the following:
Move the 256 MB RAM card from the Lombard to the Pismo.
Move the 40 GB hard drive from the Lombard to the Pismo.
Move the Lombard’s halfway decent battery from the Lombard to the Pismo.
Vice versa from the Pismo to the Lombard.
Sell the Lombared, recover some of the money spent on the Pismo.
So, I started looking and I found one for $300 on ebaY, or so I thought. If I had taken time to look at the picture more closely, on the screen bezel I would have seen the legend “Macintosh Powerbook G3.” Pismos just have “PowerBook” there. The guy said Pismo, but it turned out to be a Lombard. He said I could get a full refund, which I have gotten, and now all is well, but I still don’t own a Pismo. I decided to check Craigslist, the local free internet classifieds. I found one (a 500 MHz version) for $400 that they guy said he didn’t want because he was more comfortable with PCs. He also said he bought it new for his dad in 2000 and dad only used it three times. This meant a couple of things; it was not beat up (no rubs, scuffs or missing rubber feet) and that the battery could hold a decent charge.
He also said that 90% of the offers he was getting were people trying to get the Pismo for nothing. “I can pay via PayPal AFTER you ship it to me” or “I can send you a wire transfer or cashier’s check”, etc. A lot of these proffers are easily faked and he probably would have been out one nice Pismo. Like most local sales, I was ready to go out there with cash in hand and get it. All he had to do was call me and it would have been a done deal, but, he never did. Hope he got what he wanted.
So, now I have “Bought it now” on ebaY. I have purchased what looks to be a decent one for… $300. How funny. It is a Pismo, and it has only 256 MB of RAM, 1 stick, so I am going to remove the 256 MB stick in the Lombard, put it in the Pismo, and then I am bidding on another 64 MB stick so that when I go to sell the Lombard, it will have 128 MB of RAM. This Powerbook should last thru to the next Mac OS upgrade which will probably run on the new Intel Macs. Whew.
Filed under: Apple
