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I got my laptop battery!
Feb. 5th, 2007 08:03 pmGEEKOUT!
My 1999 iBook has got a new lease on life. It's not only one of the first generation of iBooks, but one of the very first ones in Fairbanks, if not THE first. (I'd had it on order for months when I bought it.) It's been sitting idle for maybe 2 years now, since the battery died and turned it into a small crappy desktop computer instead of a laptop, and its 300Mhz processor and 160 Mb of memory are really showing their age. I colored most of the Kismet pages on it, laid out the first RC book ... it's had a good hard life and I figured it was time to put it out to pasture.
But this past week, I installed OS X (10.3.9) and it runs like a dream! I was expecting it to either not work at all, or to have to deal with horrible slowness, but instead it's hardly slower than any brand-new machine. Of course, it's a very stripped-down installation and the only programs I use on it are AppleWorks and iTunes. You can notice the speed difference just between running those two programs, and adding another one like a web browser or System Prefs.
But still ... for basic stuff, X doesn't seem to run any slower than 9 did (though I bet it would absolutely suck for Photoshop or anything of that nature). With a $50 battery from Ebay, I now have full portability and a perfectly decent machine that I can haul around with me for writing on. I know from experience that it's nearly indestructible, and it's also virtually theft-proof; considering that it's 8 years old and only cost me $50 to get it running again, I don't really CARE if anybody steals it. I'm not going to be keeping anything on it that's not backed up somewhere else.
I was also inordinately proud of myself for getting my user directory to work correctly on another partition, since I stupidly installed X on one of the small partitions.
Very happy now! It's like getting a new computer, albeit sort of a sucky one by modern standards. But still ... the dang thing's 8 years old, and it's running the almost-newest version of the OS and does have the latest versions of all the various dohangies like iTunes and such. Say what you will about Apple, but I like 'em and will probably stick with them until they financially implode, whenever that happens.
My 1999 iBook has got a new lease on life. It's not only one of the first generation of iBooks, but one of the very first ones in Fairbanks, if not THE first. (I'd had it on order for months when I bought it.) It's been sitting idle for maybe 2 years now, since the battery died and turned it into a small crappy desktop computer instead of a laptop, and its 300Mhz processor and 160 Mb of memory are really showing their age. I colored most of the Kismet pages on it, laid out the first RC book ... it's had a good hard life and I figured it was time to put it out to pasture.
But this past week, I installed OS X (10.3.9) and it runs like a dream! I was expecting it to either not work at all, or to have to deal with horrible slowness, but instead it's hardly slower than any brand-new machine. Of course, it's a very stripped-down installation and the only programs I use on it are AppleWorks and iTunes. You can notice the speed difference just between running those two programs, and adding another one like a web browser or System Prefs.
But still ... for basic stuff, X doesn't seem to run any slower than 9 did (though I bet it would absolutely suck for Photoshop or anything of that nature). With a $50 battery from Ebay, I now have full portability and a perfectly decent machine that I can haul around with me for writing on. I know from experience that it's nearly indestructible, and it's also virtually theft-proof; considering that it's 8 years old and only cost me $50 to get it running again, I don't really CARE if anybody steals it. I'm not going to be keeping anything on it that's not backed up somewhere else.
I was also inordinately proud of myself for getting my user directory to work correctly on another partition, since I stupidly installed X on one of the small partitions.
Very happy now! It's like getting a new computer, albeit sort of a sucky one by modern standards. But still ... the dang thing's 8 years old, and it's running the almost-newest version of the OS and does have the latest versions of all the various dohangies like iTunes and such. Say what you will about Apple, but I like 'em and will probably stick with them until they financially implode, whenever that happens.