Pismo! :D

[MultiFinder]

A professor I know at my school, who also happens to be a machead and Mac user since 1984, let me borrow his projector yesterday for a club meeting. When he pulled it out of the drawer, I saw a PowerBook G3 underneath, and so I asked him about it. He said that it had stopped working some time ago, and he never wanted to bother trying to get it to work again. He asked if I wanted to try my luck with it, and I heartily agreed. I got it home, fiddled with it a bit, and lo and be hold, it boots regularly now. Battery's flat as a board, buy I'm on the lookout for a new one. But yeah, Pismo!

Specs:

500MHz PowahPC G3

128 megs RAM

12 gig HDD

No Airport

Mac OS 9.2.2 w/ Office 2001

I looooooove this thing so far; it feels relatively light, lighter than the MacBook for some reason, and that rubberyness feels so nice while carrying it around.I'm thinking that I may have a new main school notebook here

I am, naturally, posting this from said Pismo :I

 

[Bunsen]

Schweeet!

 

[tomlee59]

The Pismo is my favorite G3 machine, period. Congratulations, and enjoy!

 

[paws]

No serial ports? Useless!

Just kidding. Sweet find. I've got a Lombard myself... excellent machines.

 

[benjgvps]

Nice! I am looking for a Lombard or a Pismo myself, You got yourself a good deal there if I do say so myself.

 

[MrMacPlus]

I wish I had more of those "surprise! here's a mac for you!" kind of stories to tell, the best I've managed is walking into a huge sale located in a warehouse, and seeing a filthy Mac Plus, mouse, keyboard, external floppy, and external HD, all for $3. I wish I had this happen more often.

 

[MultiFinder]

The Pismo is my favorite G3 machine, period. Congratulations, and enjoy!

No serial ports? Useless!
Just kidding. Sweet find. I've got a Lombard myself... excellent machines.

I've found it to be an *amazing* machine. I'm gonna try and track down a battery for it, so I can finally use it as a proper notebook Then, maybe a RAM upgrade and Panther

Nice! I am looking for a Lombard or a Pismo myself, You got yourself a good deal there if I do say so myself.

I've been not-too-actively hunting for a G3 PowerBook for some time now too, so this was amazing to have it just pop in

I wish I had more of those "surprise! here's a mac for you!" kind of stories to tell... I wish I had this happen more often.

Hee-hee, don't we all?

 

[iamdigitalman]

Great, man.

I love my pismo, but it's starting to really fall apart this last week (first week of school, just my luck). The battery went from over an hour's charge, down to 5-15 minutes, and now down to nothing, and no amount of battery reset will fix it, which kind of makes it hard to sleep it and carry it to school and wake it with everything the way I left it.

The backlight also just started going really pink when I first boot or wake from sleep, so that is on it's way out, and there is a crack in the bottom of the case by the battery. It was overlapping, but I pushed it back together.

now I need a new laptop. At this point, I would not mind (hell, I would prefer) if it came with windows. That is what we are working with in the classroom (office 2k3), so I might as well match what they are doing. VPC is great, but a mite slow on the dear old 500mhz G3.

These machines are great, but their useful life as productive machines is running dry.

-digital

 

[heebiejeebies]

The battery went from over an hour's charge, down to 5-15 minutes, and now down to nothing, and no amount of battery reset will fix it

How do you reset the batteries on Pismos anyway??

And what did you have to fiddle with before it worked, MF17?

 

[Christopher]

I Love my pismo, it just needs a battery and it will be good.

 

[MultiFinder]

The battery went from over an hour's charge, down to 5-15 minutes, and now down to nothing, and no amount of battery reset will fix it

How do you reset the batteries on Pismos anyway??

And what did you have to fiddle with before it worked, MF17?

Dunno really; I just played with plugging it in, unplugging it, taking the battery out and sticking it back in, and all that good stuff. Eventually, it just randomly booted, and it has been booting happily and regularly since

 

[Christopher]

The battery went from over an hour's charge, down to 5-15 minutes, and now down to nothing, and no amount of battery reset will fix it

How do you reset the batteries on Pismos anyway??

And what did you have to fiddle with before it worked, MF17?

Apple Battery Reset OS 9 only.

 

[iamdigitalman]

no, actually, there is a long procedure involving open firmware. When I get home and locate the document, I will post it.

The battery reset app only works with the wallstreet, lombard, and early iBooks IIRC, and WILL NOT run on the pismo, though people have tried.

The first time I tried the procedure, my battery went back to an hours life. But then it went back down after a couple months to 5-15 minutes. I tried the reset again, and I think I killed my battery, because now it's flat as a board. I might try the reset again, but I don't want to set the pismo on fire.

-digital

 

[tomlee59]

A useful open-firmware reset dance goes like this:

reset-nvram

set-defaults

reset-all

The mac will reboot after the last carriage return. With luck, this will have a positive effect.

 

[MultiFinder]

If you could get back to me on that iamdigitalman, that would be wonderful

I tried what tomlee suggested, and it's still the same

EDIT: On a totally unrelated note, I just realized that an old unused Dell lappy I had around uses the same RAM, so I just doubled it to 256 megs

Now to install Jag and get rocking

 

[heebiejeebies]

Oh, I've tried that reset procedure before. It didn't work.

 

[MultiFinder]

Just an update, I found out that the Pismo can use PC133 RAM happily, so I upgraded it a bit courtesy of the old VAIO that's been hanging around here:

http://i37.tinypic.com/30usrrk.png

This is an amazing laptop

 

[heebiejeebies]

Mine's got even less memory and it still hardly feels any slower than my Mini [8D]

 

[leosadvs]

Just an update, I found out that the Pismo can use PC133 RAM happily, so I upgraded it a bit courtesy of the old VAIO that's been hanging around here:
http://i37.tinypic.com/30usrrk.png

This is an amazing laptop

Nice HD icons! where you downloaded it?