Pismo!

[Rodus]

Another recycling job, mint condition, 400Mhz/128MB but wouldn't boot. Took it home, disabled the very dead PRAM battery and now it's purring away happily on 9.1. I always wanted a Pismo but wasn't prepared to pay the insane eBay prices so very chuffed with this find.

 

[J English Smith]

Nice! Yes, that little PRAM trick is so simple...

Be sure to give her lots of nice RAM, it's cheap now...10.4 runs fine with 512mb but the more, the better. If you want to keep running classic, 128 or 256 should be fine.

 

[olePigeon]

Awesome. That's the same model I have. The battery only holds a charge for about 3 minutes, so whenever I put it away and want to use it again, I have to disconnect the battery. I should probably just replace it.

I took mine to a LAN party last weekend. Everyone was playing Diablo III (I have no interest in Diablo III), so I played Warlords II, Myth II, and Civilizations. Had a blast!

 

[Rodus]

I'm keeping it as a classic machine, got the iBook G3 for Mobile Tiger. I pulled one of the 64MB chips and stuck in a 128, 196 MB should be fine for 9.1.

My battery is the same as yours olePigeon, about 3 mins of charge, it may actually be possible to open the battery and put in some new cells, I need to look into this.

I got extra lucky in that there was an Airport card already installed too

I've also got an IDE to CF adapter en route at the moment, I was going to stick it in my Beige G3 but I'm thinking it would be great in the Pismo, 8GB CF vs ancient 6GB IBM drive.

BTW, does anyone know where I can download 9.2.1/9.2.2 updates? Apples site keeps giving me a not found error.

 

[olePigeon]

Their site is broken. If you do a Google search for Mac_OS_9.2.1_Update.smi.bin and Mac_OS_9.2.2_Update.smi.bin you'll find several mirrors from which to download the files.

 

[Rodus]

Thanks, eventually found them. I've dug through my parts box and bumped the RAM up to 320MB and put in a 40 gig HD, dual booting Panther and 9.2.2. Was tempted to go for Tiger but when I remembered the grinding performance on my iMac DV I decided against it, the GPU is the one weak point of this machine for modern use.

 

[mcdermd]

Tiger is okay to use on a 400MHz Pismo once you push it past 512MB RAM.

 

[Rodus]

^^I suppose it would be rather more useable then Panther, I've probably got another 256 meg RAM chip somewhere to go up to 512 and as long as I use Shadowkiller the performance shouldn't be too painful.

 

[theos911]

I ran Tiger on a 300MHz Wallstreet w/512 and no shadowkiller and all was well. (I did kill spotlight and dashboard though.)

 

[Brett B.]

Cool score. I think Tiger would be plenty usable; I have it on a 333MHz-upgraded Rev. A iMac with 256MB RAM. It's not great but is still fast enough to be useful for basic stuff. I haven't put Shadowkiller on it yet and I expect that would help quite a bit.

 

[J English Smith]

What is Shadowkiller?

 

[theos911]

Shadowkiller is a freeware utility by Unsanity that kills all window and menu shadows in MacOS X.

http://unsanity.com/haxies/shadowkiller

Actual performance increase is often measured with Let1kWindowsBloom.

http://www.vgg.com/rob/WindowsBloom.html

 

[Rodus]

Shadowkiller does make Tiger feel far more snappy on old GPU's. I've ordered a new battery and 512MB stick so soon it'll be good to go.