Bought a near mint Pismo

[Hugh]

New 32gb KingSpec KSD-PA25.6-032MS SSD arrived yesterday, only 7 days from China to UK

5 hours last night to do a Carbon Copy Cloner to the new drive in a USB enclosure, and test booting from the USB drive once cloned - it boots fine using the Option key at startup, but not recognized in System Prefs -> Startup Disk

10 minutes spent installing it in the Pismo this morning, half of that time was looking for a flipping screw on the carpet.

Booted straight away, seems very snappy so far.

Before the new drive I took some timings for various actions - boot-up time to desktop, starting Dashboard, opening a large Excel document, Camino startup time and opening a .jpg with Gimp.

Boot-up seems 25% faster, and most other actions about 20% quicker, except for some reason opening Dashboard took 20% longer (but I think it may be iStat was looking for a HDD temp which of course the SSD cannot supply).

Battery life should also be even better but only time will tell.

On the whole well pleased [] ]'> [] ]'> , just need to find out if I can get trim support, although according to Kingspec this drive already has automatic bad block management, not the same but helps when it gets a little more used.

Cheers

Hugh

Edit: Dashboard opening 20% faster now temp sensors disabled in iStat.

 

[J English Smith]

Thanks for the report! Very interesting, I may have to invest in one of these in a couple months. Let us know about the battery life effect after you've had a chance to judge, Hugh.

Got a sad surprise yesterday - Other World Computing (NuPower) has discontinued their excellent Pismo-series LiIon batteries. I was going to pop for another of those this year. I have two of their batteries in my rotation, but both have seen many charges. I'll have to eventually take a flier on one of the Chinese-made ones when all of my current Apple OEM ones start to fail... Well, I imagine there are not many Pismo owners who were paying ~$80 for a new battery...

 

[Hugh]

Indeed not, I paid £38 ($60) with free shipping for each of my two eBay batteries, and of course won't know how good they are for quite some time (I hope 8-o )

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Gotta love the Pismo. Beater_3/500MHz/768GB/37.26GB/clean install of 10.4.11 was a Craig's list find about three years ago. It came setup to play a DVD automagically when I pop one in and has a WiFi Card that's faster than AirPort. Lots of TLC from the previous owner, it was bundled with a Wallstreet PDQ and a Blueberry iBook. Gotta re-glue one side of the hacked DVD's door back on, thanks for the reminder.

I got a second Pismo with a PartsMo just to get the BookEndz Dock for the first one. [] ]'>

 

[Blessed Cheesemaker]

OWC discontinued their Pismo batteries? Well, that is too bad...but, I guess it saves me some $$$.

Also, I did install and run 10.5 Leopard on my G4 Pismo a while back. It ran ok, but when you needed to do something that required the graphics card, that was where I ran into problems.

For example, I could look at iPhoto thumbnails, but when I went to open the photo up in iPhoto to look at it larger, or start to adjust it, it would just come up with a blank screen. Text and other stuff was ok, it was probably a little slower than Tiger, but not by much.

I eventually went back to 10.4 Tiger, as the Pismo was my main machine until early 2009, and I needed to get work done on it, and do my iPhoto-ing.

 

[Hugh]

I'm actually pleasantly surprised by Tiger on the Pismo, it's a no frills proper OS X, unlike Lion on the MacBook which is beginning to have a Windows-like feel with all the decisions the OS makes on the user's behalf, and all the fancy extras.

If I ever get some sort of G4 processor for it I'm probably not going up to Leopard if it gets stuck on graphics editing - unbelievably I tried installing PhotoShop CS3 yesterday and it seems to be working fine.

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Hugh]

Just bought a 500mhz daughter board from eBay US, but before shipping to me the seller (mac-pro18005253888) will look and see if they have a G4 board.

So, pleased with the 500, even more pleased if they can supply a G4.

I currently have a 400mhz board, overclocked to 450 (overclocking to 500 gave some KPs) - does anyone with a Pismo know how high you can go with a 500mhz board? I reckon 550 is safe but will it go as high as 600?

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Hugh]

Well, it turned out the seller had a G4 board in stock, and although he wanted an extra $90 I went for it.

It also turns out it's a 550, so I might be tempted to give Leopard a whirl, give that I have a Carbon Copy Cloner USB drive to fall back on and that I've proven to boot.



I now have a G3 400, 450 or 500 to spare if anybody needs them, although I'll probably keep the 500 just in case.

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Hugh]

Last thing, just in case someone needs to know - the temptation was too much and I installed Leopard, and it runs like a dog 8-o

As others have found, only the battery in the right hand bay is recognised. The dock is very jerky, Mail wouldn't open until I applied the 10.5.8 combo, the graphics have slowed down to an unacceptable crawl.

Tiger re-cloned back, and the old Pismo is back to quick and slick.

Cheers

Hugh

 

[mcdermd]

As I recall, Tiger on a Pismo with 1GB RAM was always really nice.