On Saturday 31 December 2005 06:23 am, Richard Starr wrote: > My wife's original clamshell has 288megs of memory and has a 300 mhz G3. > There's a three gig hard drive
First the good news: that's a nice amount of RAM in there. 256+32. While it's not as good as the 544MB of RAM my clamshell has now, my Aunt Karen had Jagwire running with 192MB RAM when she gave it to me last year. It was slow, true, but not nearly as slow as I would have thought it would be. I was thinking it would be Windows 2000 with 64MB of RAM on a PII slow, but nope, it was actually usable. Now the bad news: the 3GB stock hard drive is just not good enough to use under X. 3GB is fine under Mac OS 9.x but it really sucks under Mac OS X. My suggestion: ship your machine to Wegener Media, the company in South Carolina that did the upgrades on my clamshell. They gave me a 512MB memory upgrade and put a 30GB Fujitsu hard drive in to replace the tired old 3.2GB drive. It is now running Panther 10.3.9 with all the updates/upgrades. They only charge a flat $50 fee for labor, because they specialize in working on PowerBooks and iBooks and are intimately familiar with their guts. If you try to have this upgrade done locally, once your tech guy gets over the "deer caught in the headlights" look as he ponders the horror of working on a clamshell iBook, he will charge you a hell of a lot more on the labor. Wegener's prices on parts are also very fair. Heck, you can even get a CD-RW or even a Superdrive replacement for your CD-ROM. It costs a bomb, but it might be worth it to do as long as they are doing major surgery on the iBook. I strongly suggest staying with Panther on this machine, unless you want to take the time to kill all Tiger eye candy and kill Dashboard. Aside from a version of iChat that can handle a Google Talk account, why bother with Tiger? Panther seems to also be more stable than Tiger. Oh yeah: one more thing...do you have an AirPort card in this clamshell? In a way, if you don't have one it's almost not worth it to do extensive work on your clamshell. Wegener charges $109.99 for an AirPort card. This is expensive, but comparable for the prices AirPort cards fetch on eBay. If you already have your AirPort, that's totally cool...go get the upgrades. If you don't, you might as well keep running 9 until 9 gets totally unusable, then put Debian on the thing and use it as a router/firewall with a USB 10 base T dongle in the USB slot. AirPort is the undisputed best experience in wireless. Nothing is that smooth. Not wireless on a Windozer, not wireless in Linux. AirPort "just works" when it works. It's a dream to be able to use a local wireless access point as easily as using wired Ethernet. Smooth as silk. And a clamshell has a huge antenna in the lid, so you will be able to use fainter access points than even someone using an external antenna on a PC. And under Mac OS X you have MacStumbler. Free download. http://www.macstumbler.com/ . Need 802.11b access? With MacStumbler and an iBook you will probably be able to "stumble upon" a Red Linksys to "piggyback" on. Of course, your legal mileage may vary depending on where you live. ^_^ http://www.wegenermedia.com/ . -- 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-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml> --> 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-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com
