Powerbook 5300cs + Orinoco Gold + Web browser

[somorastik]

Hi!

I resurected old Powerbook 5300cs (100MHz, 24Mb RAM, Os 9.0 retail) for my dad to read his favourite news site (www.sme.sk) but the site takes ages to load on Explorer 5.1.7 which Im testing out right now.

What would you guys recomend for a web browser for this machine? Is there a "pure text" mode in some of the browsers (something like reading mode in Safari?), that would be ideal for my dad.

Also I had trouble seting up the Outlook to comunicate with GMAIL. Are there anny tricks to make this working? What is the simplest yet good mail client you guys use?

Also in other news Im going to set up a Quadra 700 to connect to the net I hope, at least make a tweet or two. I will keep you posted and post some pics.

Thanks!!! Let the old macs live forever!

 

[J English Smith]

S - the WannaBe text browser is good on the older Powerbooks, I use it frequently. You could set that site to be the home page for him. The URL window is funky, you have to highlight and replace the whole URL with WB, double or triple clicking does not select the whole current URL.

I use Eudora 6.2 to "fetch" things from my Hotmail account, it was tricky to get set up right but once you have that done, works well. When it pulls mail, though, it deletes them from my Hotmail inbox. I am sure there's a setting to stop that, I've just been too lazy to poke around. But I guess the native setting is "download and delete."

Good luck! The 5300 and 1400 are great form factors, if the 5300 is just too slow for him, try a 1400/166 with maximum RAM, it is still a useable web machine, using Classilla and WannaBe.

 

[J English Smith]

You might also try stepping the 5300 down to OS 8.6 if 9.0 is proving too much of a memory/resource hog. 8.6 is a stable OS and is about the lowest for easy operation with the Orinoco drivers.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

iCab works great on the 5300c, and is "usable" (for some very strange definitions) even on an 8 MB machine. (Although 24 MB is much better.)

 

[somorastik]

Hi,

yeah the Os9 is a real RAM junkie eating up at least 14Mb out of my 25mb. Classila web browser wont even load. I tried iCab but it was much slower than IE5. All the modern sites take ages to load, would that change with Os 8.6 ?

Eudora seems great I will set it up right now.

I will let you know guys how it went, thanks so much for help.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Unless you use something like RAM Doubler (which I would strongly advise in that configuration), few browsers will be happy. Classilla, for example, won't even start without a minimum of 64MB addressable memory, which can be made up from physical and virtual. RAM Doubler 9 should be just fine on a 5300.

 

[highlandcattle]

Wannabe browser will also be awesome for your Quadra 700: http://mindstory.com/wb2/. I use it all the time to install software on my emate300

 

[somorastik]

Okay, Powerbook works very well with Orinoco Gold, wanabe browser is great, maybe I should try to block out all the java content on the site I want to view, so it would load faster.

I havent had any luck with Classilla, I will try to downgrade to Os 8.6

Thanks for help folks

 

[highlandcattle]

Classila is really slow on anything older then a decent G3. Even on my PM 6500/275 it crawled. Better use the latest IE then

 

[theos911]

For anything pre-G3, I've found various versions of Netscape Navigator to be the fastest and most stable, and surprisingly the best at rendering pages well without CSS, Java and other fancy stuff. Classilla is best on G3 w/ 64Mb of RAM or more. Assuming you have a machine that meets those, Classilla will blow navigator out of the water, especially on features.

I've not tried Classilla on my 2300c, b/c atm, I'm stuck with 8.5. Classilla will technically work on 8.5, but I don't want to have my first experience with it on a lower spec'd machine be polluted by the oddball of os 8 line.

 

[kite210]

For older machines, I use netscape navigator 2.02, even though the javascript errors are kinda annoying, it works.