[Kyros]

I should be getting a Pismo soon and have a couple of questions for upgrading it.

First of all, I want to put a high cap battery in it. Nupower has a nice 7500 mah (more than 50% better than the original) battery, but personally I've had very bad experiences with Nupower batteries. One battery for a Tibook barely lasted 3.5 hours and my dad had get 4 replacement batteries before he got one with acceptable charge. Is this a fluke or have people in general had similar experiences? I saw that Truepower seems to have the next best battery at 6600 mah.

Also, for upgrading the processor, there seem to be two choices, the G4/550 and the G3/900. Actually, I'm not sure if the 900 still exists. I was wondering first of all about heat issues involved for both of them, as well as power consumption. Also, considering the G3 is 900 mHz, how would it compare to the G4 for Altivec enhanced stuff? It's almost twice as fast, would it still be on par with the G4?

[Banana]

I have a Pismo in the closet, either the chip or the board died a while back. I did look at upgrade options, and based on what I learned, I'd go with G4 for single reasons: it is Tiger capable (can't say about Leoptard though). However, I've read repots that G3 are pound for pound faster, runs cooler. The real benefit of G4 comes out when you have to work with graphics a lot. But if it's going to be your web surfboard, G3 may be just fine, but don't expect support.

Can't say about battery, though.

Congrats on getting a pismo. They're a piece of work.

Also, if I were going to upgrade pismo, I'd opt for DIY upgrade. But that's only because I have nothing to lose since that Pismo is broken and it'll cost me more to have a technician service it, as most programs asks that you have a working computer to "trade-in" or pay the full price.

[Luca]

By far the most important thing you can do is keep an eye on how much you're spending. Keep track of it and make sure you're not throwing good money after bad. I wouldn't spend more than $500, TOTAL, for a Pismo, including all the upgrades (battery, processor upgrade, hard drive, RAM, etc). Remember that there are quite a few things you can never upgrade:

- Graphics processor. The Pismo uses a Rage 128, which is horribly outdated and can't do Quartz Extreme. That means general use in OS X suffers.
- Screen. It has the original 14", 1024x768 screen, and that's it. Six years ago, the screen was already dimmer than new screens are today. After that much use, there's a good chance that it's gotten even dimmer. I've used some old laptops before whose screens were dimmer at full brightness than my PowerBook is at minimum brightness.
- Motherboard. There are a lot of integral components that are, and always will be, old and slow. The frontside bus is 100 MHz and will never be faster. You do have a PCMCIA slot for expansion, but you'll probably want to use that for a wireless card (the Pismo will take original Airport cards, but those cost far more than they're worth these days).

Just remember that a much newer, much faster iBook G4 can be had for only a few hundred dollars more than the Pismo costs. Some of these computers are still under their warranty, and they are more likely to have working batteries and good, bright screens. Furthermore, they're faster than the Pismo will ever be, even fully upgraded. By now, the Pismo's legendary expandability is only good enough to let it keep up with early G4 iBooks.

The main point in favor of the Pismo, outside of its venerable reputation, is the fact that the iBook G3 was an unreliable computer that should be avoided. Apple's extended service contract on G3 iBooks is quickly expiring, and the chances of the motherboard dying in such a machine is too high to risk buying one for anything more than a bargain-basement price.

[Kyros]

Thanks for the concern, Luca, but I'm not getting a Pismo because it's cheap, it's because I've always wanted a Pismo. It's a bit of a hobby of mine to buy old macs and upgrade them. I already own a 1.5 ghz 12 inch G4 PB, but the Pismo intrigues me in part because with 2 high cap batteries, the "estimated" battery life should be around 15 hours (I'm sure it will be less, but breaking 10 hours would be awesome). I'm sure I'll end up paying something like 1000+ dollars total by the end, which is fine by me. Yah it's an expensive hobby, but I don't spend much money on other things, and the other ones I've done have been far cheaper (Cube, beige G3, beige powermac), so meh . I have no qualms paying a little extra to get high quality stuff, so I don't mind the price of the Nupower batteries, I'm just worried about the quality :/.

I plan on using it for websurfing, word processing, maybe some starcraft and EV:Nova, all of which could be handled without a processor upgrade I'm sure, so I will do that upgrade last if at all. Also, I plan on running Panther not Tiger, in my experience Tiger has been a bit slow compared to Panther and the only thing I really use at all is spotlight, and even that rarely.

On the other hand, it would be a lot of money to spend when I already have this laptop. It's something I've been debating about for about a year now (and it was a clamshell iBook before the Pismo because they look so cool). I really hope I get a relatively high paying job in the future, I could easily see myself building up a sort of mac museum in my house whether or not I can really afford it.

[Ebby]

The G3 processor is now up to 1Ghz+ and is faster than the G4 at many things.

I would use the money to max the RAM

My battery is from BTI and lasted 6 hours when new. Now it is around 5:15.

spotlight does slow things down a little bit, but I consider it worth the upgrade. The time remaining stopped working on my pismo, even after a full charge/discharge cycle. I still get percentage charged.

Gotta find a cat...

[Kyros]

I don't really care about the time remaining thing, percentage is good enough for me. Thanks for the info on the BTI battery, that does sound quite impressive, what conditions was the 6 hours under?

[Ebby]

I turn the screen brightness down when indoors, but other than that I use the default power saving profile.

[sennen]

i bought a pismo from ebay recently so had to go through alot of these issues as well. for me, whether or not it was an ibook G4, powerbook g4 or a pismo, it was still going to be an obsolete machine. i couldn't see the sense in spending alot more money for a newer (yet still 'obsolete') powerbook or ibook - i might as well go the whole hog and get a new macbook or MacBookPro.

i managed to pick up an upgraded g4/550 pismo for about $100 more than the cost of the g4 upgrade and it has been great. i've installed fcp 4.5, dvdsp 4, compressor, photoshop, illustrator etc. and they run perfectly well. the difference is only noticed in rendering, exporting and encoding. by using an external drive as a scratch disc, and copying my project files to it, i can take that to work and render etc on dual g5s, otherwise there's nothing i do at home that is so urgent that i can't let it render overnight. and as far as iLife and DVDs, it goes great.

however, another thing to add to the list of additional expenses to consider is the optical drive. the original LG drive in mine was flakey - intermitently and seemingly randomly reading discs. as i was thinking of getting an external dual layer burner anyhow, i ended up getting a pioneer dvr-k06 for the same price as a case + burner. it is working a treat so far.

touch wood that i haven't jinxed myself now. that's one thing you have to consider with a six year old computer, something may just break down at any time. but i love the feel of the pismo, and the design - it really is a classic.

sennen.

[PB PM]

I had a Lombard 400Mhz, loved it, but I ran into the age problem, the CPU was shot a month after I got it. I just could not justify spending another $100 to get a new CPU. I really like the feel of those machines over the ibook, and it was about the same size, although clearly slower than my 1.42Ghz machine. Since all I did was surf, I got a card slot wireless card which was great, to bad I got it just before the machine chose to die. So the machine went back on ebay as parts for half what I paid for it.

[Kyros]

Originally Posted by sennen however, another thing to add to the list of additional expenses to consider is the optical drive. the original LG drive in mine was flakey - intermitently and seemingly randomly reading discs. as i was thinking of getting an external dual layer burner anyhow, i ended up getting a pioneer dvr-k06 for the same price as a case + burner. it is working a treat so far.

I haven't used the optical drive on this powerbook much at all beyond the initial installation and making some disk images, so I'm not worried there, I plan on using 2 batteries anyway.

I've seen a couple of PCMCIA slot graphics cards floating around (http://sewelldirect.com/vtbookpcmciacard.asp for instance). I was wondering if these could actually be used to effectively increase my graphics performance or if it just lets you add more displays?

[Kyros]

The Pismo and a 512 memory chip should be in the mail shortly .