Is there any life left in my iBook SE 466?

[Sosai X]

So I have an iBook SE 466 Mhz that I bought 8 years ago. Is there anything I can do with it nowadays? I had it running OS 9.2.2, but Firefox doesnt run on that.. and IE 5 is demon-spawn horrible... i have the RAM maxed to 320 mb. I have tried Mac OS X 10.1.2, but it's mind numbingly slow. Is there some performance tweaks I can use to squeeze better perfomance out of it? Or should I just give it some cement overshoes, and go out and buy a new macbook?

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[MacMan]

There most certainly is life still left in your iBook! Your experience with Mac OS X 10.1.2 will probably taint your opinion of Mac OS X as it is an old and slow version. It would be much better to try Mac OS X 10.3 or 10.4 on the machine to really appreciate OS X, and these later versions will run fine on your iBook with it's current specs. Installer disks for these versions are generally available cheaply second hand (eg on eBay) these days. Certainly I have a 400MHz iMac G3 running 10.4 and it is very usable as a general internet machine.

 

[Dan 7.1]

10.1 is just bad...throw on 10.2 or 10.3 and your experience will be much more enjoyable.

there's free and lightweight word processors like Bean which will run very well on that older system, PDF duties can be handled by Skim, Camino is a great lightweight browser which uses the same backend as Firefox. there are tons of free, lightweight programs which can be used to speed up your iBook'ing experience.

at the end of the day there is no way that the iBook is going to be comparable to a new MacBook or MacBook Pro in terms of performance. its always going to be slow and there is little you can do about that. that does not mean its useless by any means, and if you don't feel like dropping all the money necessary to buy a new system then it will still function perfectly fine.

word of warning, Flash will probably bring it to a screeching halt...youtube is the old-mac killer.

 

[tomlee59]

I heartily agree with Macman -- with the right software, that iBook can serve you well for many more years. I have 10.3.9 on an original Blueberry iBook. Although no one would describe its performance as zippy, it is nonetheless useful.

You might actually be able to go beyond the official limit of 320MB of RAM; if so, doing so will help OSX do better still.

 

[luddite]

I have a 466 se with 576 MB RAM and 10.4.11 installed. It's pretty much my main machine... used mainly for DTP and web graphics. I find the speed quite acceptable. Tiger is rock-solid on this machine and faster than previous cats.

Only downside is that some apps have dialog windows bigger than the 600x800 display.

 

[Sosai X]

Woot! I was playing around this morning with a copy of OSx86 that I had downloaded a while ago, and I thought, will it install on my iBook? To my suprise, it did! Install went well, but when the desktop came up my screen was a mash of greyscale pixels. I was able to muddle my way around enough to get Software Update to work, and now my iBook is running 10.4.11. Much much better than the beastly 10.1.2 I had before. Might be enough incentive to go out and buy a macbook pro with my tax refund! Thank you all for your help and suggestions.

:b&w:

 

[Quadraman]

Great that you managed to make your iBook useful again. The 466 SE is becoming something of a collectible being the last and most powerful model of the clamshell line.

 

[benjgvps]

Xubuntu 7.04. I can do many websites that I browse regularly (Engadget, Gizmodo, Lifehacker) on my 350MHz iMac, from Firefox. With 466MHz it should be great! I have had problems with 7.10 so stay away, also when you partition, do it in drive setup: Make a OS 9 partition and leave the rest free space. When you go to partition in the Linux setup just make it take over free space. If internet is what you want to do, Linux is what you need!

 

[QuadSix50]

Xubuntu 7.04. I can do many websites that I browse regularly (Engadget, Gizmodo, Lifehacker) on my 350MHz iMac, from Firefox. With 466MHz it should be great! I have had problems with 7.10 so stay away, also when you partition, do it in drive setup: Make a OS 9 partition and leave the rest free space. When you go to partition in the Linux setup just make it take over free space. If internet is what you want to do, Linux is what you need!

You could also use Debian. They have a netinstall ISO that defaults to the XFCE desktop instead of GNOME. They also have one with KDE as the default if you so choose.

 

[Devon]

my ibook SE/466 graphite is decked out with 576 megs of ram and a 60 gig 7200 rpm drive, i love it runs 10.3.9 just fine, i use it for itunes and web browsing and playing SNES 9x, it also plays DVDS quite well. I feel its a great machine and allthough slow works just fine for me.

 

[benjgvps]

You could also use Debian. They have a netinstall ISO that defaults to the XFCE desktop instead of GNOME. They also have one with KDE as the default if you so choose.

I find Xubuntu is easy to install. It just takes someone some trial and error, then that person posts instructions. I like being that person as long as I have not destroyed anything...