On Monday 14 July 2003 09:29 am, Lewin A.R.W. Edwards wrote: > For around the same price as a Firewire iBook, I could get a Lombard. I > mulled over this a while, but then I realized that for just a few > dollars more I could get a Pismo with a much friskier architecture, NICE > BIG SCREEN (compared to iBook), more expandability, and integral > Firewire ports. The end price point was $749 + $30 shipping - more than > I initially wanted to spend (I was hoping to spend ~$500), but I feel > that the extra expense was justified even if only for the larger screen. > (Also, this machine's fulltime job will be working on a book which is > contractually guaranteed to earn me at least $2,000 - so it's already > paid for). > > My Pismo - which should be arriving this afternoon, God and UPS willing > - is 192/6Gb/DVD/Zip, and since I have plenty of RAM and HDDs lying > around, I can make it either 384/20Gb or maybe 512/20Gb for nothing. If > I was paying for those upgrades, I'd expect to pay less than $240 total.
Pismo rocks. It's the last of the black beauty Powerbooks, and is as capable as an iBook2, give or take a hundred megahertz or two. You won't be able to play Unreal Tournament 2003 on it, but the original UT (check eBay or Amazon zShops or Yahoo Auctions) for Macintosh will run beautifully on it. It is a decent performer in MacOS X, great booted to MacOS 9.x and it will rock if you run LinuxPPC on it. It has Rage128 video which is the first really decent 3D video system ATI made. It might look sucky compared to Radeons and GeForce 4 2Go but it is still way better than what had come before in Lombards and Wallstreets. It also has this "shock and awe" effect on people. Pismos, Lombards and Wallstreets all just have this "look at me, I'm bitchen" vibe. The big, bright TFT screen, the luminous white apple shining on the Stealth Black lid of the case...it never fails. You get an audience whenever you take the thing out to use it in public. This actually might be a bad thing, come to think of it. ^_^ You will also be blessed with a non-troublesome card cage. The poor guy who is having trouble with his Wallstreet suddenly not recognizing PCMCIA cards might have fallen prey to the touchy card cage problem. Apple discontinued auto-eject PCMCIA cages for a reason. Unfortunately there isn't a fix for this short of buying a new card cage to swap out for the old one. The Lombard and Pismo manual-eject systems aren't as sexy, but they also aren't as prone to failure. -.\\<-H- -- Michelle Klein-Hass Box 2273, Van Nuys, CA 91404-2273 Brought to you by Linux, KDE and KMail...try it, you'll like it! -- G-Books is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Check our web site for refurbished PowerBooks | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-Books list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-books%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
