Finally! A Pismo!!!

[coius]

Coming all the way from the neighbors to my north (Canada), I have in the post office (just cleared customs) A 400Mhz Pismo! I think it has 320MB RAM, 30GB HDD, DVD-ROM and unlike last time I know it's going to be a Pismo (Name is ommited unless seller wants to say anything) coming from a 68k Member.

The last time I had a pismo was back in 2005. It was my main machine after several times my iBook G3 900Mhz went in for service 14x times :O

During that time, I spilled coffee into the pismo 5x, each time I cleaned it out, let it dry, and like the trooper it was, it would start up. I had it pretty decked out when I had it (60GB HDD, dual new batteries, 1GB RAM, DVD/CD-RW (one of those upgrades they offered) with a 400Mhz CPU.

It was in mint condition when I got it, and unfortunately, during the dismantle back then, I sort of ripped the trackpad connector off the motherboard. I continued using it with an external mouse, but it was hard to use it as a laptop.

Fast forward to now, and since that fateful day, I have kept all liquids (and food) away from my laptops and haven't spilled/ruined one yet.

This machine is going to get the upgrades that were in the lombard I got, the Lombard will become an exclusively Classic OS machine, and when the pismo gets here, it will have waiting a new 65Mah battery, 768MB RAM, 16GB (or leave the 30GB in) SSD or Hard drive. It will also have an Airport card (I can't remember if there is already one in it) so I can hop on Wifi right away.

Oh glorious day! I finally have my beloved (and the coolest/most rugged laptop I have ever had) Pismo once more!

(I shall post pics when it's done)

 

[coius]

Pismo arrived today (didn't post earlier) and I have done various benchmarks. I was planning on putting the Solid-state drive into it, but after looking at how the real-world performance measure up over a 30GB ATA hard drive, I have decided against it. the SSD will stay in my Lombard as while it will max out the Lombard's ATA-2 connection, it's woefully slow on the Pismo which has a ATA-5 bus. The 30GB HDD hits up to 30MB/s, on write (non-cached, sequential write) and has better over-all random read/write (weird huh?)

While the SSD can do random read off the charts (up to 55MB/s) I am not really centered on the random read due to how much more important it would be in the event that I would hit swap. I hit swap once on this laptop and it immediately went to a halt. Doing benchmarks showed exactly why it was doing it. Random write was hitting almost all the way down to 20KB/s max Not worth it. Using XBench the drive scored 9.02 points. the 30GB ATA-5 drive was at about 32.44 points. It seems the 30GB would be much better, so I am copying the files over firewire to the hard drive.

The video is about 55-75% faster in benchmarks (under OS 9 and OS X) than the Rage LT PCI-based video card on the Lombard.

the FSB also increases not only the cpu benchmarks, but RAM increased between 33-47% faster than the Lombard.

So right now, it's a 400Mhz G3 w/ 768MB RAM, 14.1" TFT LCD, Rage Mobility w/ 8MB SGRAM on an AGP 2x Bus. It came with an airport in the slot. So that is nice. I got it on wifi seperated from my main network with WEP 128.

The keyboard is nice, the battery was dead and bulging so that will be thrown out (actualy, recycled) due to the case itself being distorted. I transfered the optical drive from the lombard (superdrive slot-load) into the Pismo as I see that will be better there. The DVD-ROM will go into the Lombard as the one in the pismo seems to read DVD+Rs where as the one from the Lombard won't.

All in all, I am happy.

 

[Strimkind]

That unit served me well and I am glad it is going to still get some good use!