Pretty Great Pismo Conquest

[Yeager]

I haven't posted in quite a while, but I thought that this recent conquest was worth posting. I have been thinking about converting my collection to a more New World/Laptop oriented collection to save space; and as a result I have been patrolling Craigslist to look for some good deals. I found a computer recycler that I had not stumbled into before, and I decided to give them a call.

To cut to the chase, I went there and found that they had a 500Mhz Pismo for $40! It was in pretty solid shape (no cracks, no pink tint, no major defects), but it was also pretty dirty/missing the IR port cover, so I got the price down to $33! It was in a nasty laptop bag (will be tossed), but it included the original charger, install disk, and even the paperwork! I wiped the 9.0.4 install and installed 10.4, and now I am posting on it! I definitely see why these laptops are so well regarded in the PPC community!

I'm planning to buy a Wireless G card to support modern WiFi and max out the ram if I can find a decently priced stick 512MB. I think i'll turn this into my main portable (I actually don't have any other), it handles internet pretty darn well

-Yeager

Question: I'm considering putting a m-sata SSD/PATA adapter in this because I think this HD is on its last legs, has anybody tried this before? I've searched around, but it seems that the only confirmed successes are in Powerbook G4s.

 

[LazarusNine]

Excellent news, Yeager. Congrats on the Pismo find. $33 is of course a very good deal even with the small number of issues you mention. The closest I've come to a Pismo is a 400Mhz Lombard.

In response to your question about the hard drive, there are a few people who've posted about IDE SSDs. They're likely great, but they tend to cost more than their SATA counterparts. I opted for a different option, which is an IDE to CompactFlash converter. I bought a 32GB CF card for it (make sure it's branded as having UDMA). Plugged it in, and as they say, 'Bob's your uncle'. It works perfectly. It's silent, faster than the HDD and not so fast that the speed of an SSD is wasted on a slow IDE transfer speed (though the CF card I bought reads and writes at a rate far higher than the ATA transfer rate of my Lombard). And it was cheap - the adapter is about $3 and the CF card can be had for about $20.

 

[Yeager]

Thanks for the info! The Pismo and the Lombard are almost the same, so I would have purchased either one

Have you done any throughput tests with the new Compact Flash SSD? I have considered it, but I would prefer to do whatever is faster (or whatever works), because it seems that I could go for either for similar cost.

I ran into a new problem today. I charged the charged to 3700 mah with only 77 load cycles, but it will only get to about 90% and then go asleep with the battery showing one blinking LED. If I go into System Profiler it now states that the battery has no cycles and that the full charge capacity is a very large negative number. Does or anyone know if there is a good way to reset the battery?

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

It's probably just dead.

 

[Bunsen]

Honestly a good UDMA CF card is likely to be faster than the IDE channel in those machines.  I don't see throughput being an issue.

 

[ScutBoy]

Yeager,

Do you live in the Twin Cities? This Pismo sounds very similar to one I set up for the Free Geek in Minneapolis, all the way down to the bag, paperwork and install disk.

Same batch had a nice 667Mhz DVI Ti, but I need to swap in a working optical drive.

 

[J English Smith]

New Apple batteries on eBay right now for $80, alas, that's the best deal I have seen in awhile. These batteries got scarce... Great machines though. I need to try one with a cf card install soon too.

 

[J English Smith]

On the current battery, try 2-3 charge and discharge cycles. If then you still can't get it through boot on that battery it is no go.

 

[Yeager]

Yeager,

Do you live in the Twin Cities? This Pismo sounds very similar to one I set up for the Free Geek in Minneapolis, all the way down to the bag, paperwork and install disk.

Same batch had a nice 667Mhz DVI Ti, but I need to swap in a working optical drive.

Yes I do, you must be the Mac guy they were talking about   So you are the one who installed Internet Explorer on it?  Too bad the 667Mhz Titanium wasn't out there, I looked at the 867Mhz that they had in the store, but it didn't seem to be in the best of shape (bottom case was a little too scuffed up for my liking). The Titanium is the next laptop on my list. How nice is that 667Mhz?

I have gone through several discharge cycles on the battery, and it seems that it has a small capacity, but enough to keep ram contents while plugging it in elsewhere. I saw the battery on eBay, but $80 is a lot to spend on a laptop that cost only $33! However, I did score a Motorola wireless G card on eBay for $2, and it has better security than a standard Airport card.

Has anyone tried a M-sata to PATA adapter on one of these? I'm looking at prices for compact flash cards, and it seems that I could get more storage for the same amount of money with M-sata.

Thanks for all the help!

-Yeager

Some pics:

 

[ScutBoy]

Yeager,

Yup, that's probably me, though there are a couple other guys who work the Mac side as well. You can't pin IE on me- that's what Apple had as the default browser on the included restore disk   I had contemplated putting a newer OS on that guy, but if we get the original media for the Macs, general policy is to install that, and let the end user decide if they want a change.

I swapped the optical in the 667 for another, and it also did not work. Seems odd that two would be bad. Both would accept a disk, then grind around seeking for a while, then spit the disk out. I have one more "organ donor" machine to provide a third drive. We'll see how that goes. I plan to spend the afternoon there Thursday, so I should know more after that. The machine looks pretty good otherwise, and it has a decent battery. If it's something you are interested in, PM me and I'll ask them to hold it for you to inspect under your name.

 

[Yeager]

It is definitely a really cool nonprofit. I was just giving you a hard time about IE, I've used a whole lot of OS 9 in my day   I thought it was pretty cool that it had the original operating system installed, but I wanted something a little more modern.

I would love to buy a nice Titanium G4, but I really need to get rid of some of my desktops before I expand my collection. That is pretty weird about the optical drive, hopefully you'll be able to fix it.

 

[J English Smith]

It's a shame about the batteries. They are scarce now. Every now and then you'll see an untested one on the 'Bay in the $20 range, but that's about it. The onldy other option is rebuilding one, which I have not attempted. A year ago, they were much more plentiful. Now there are tons of Wallstreet batteries, though. Go figure.

 

[CC_333]

Well, if there are so many cheap Wallstreet batteries around, maybe if they use the same type cells as the Lombard/Pismo battery, one can just cannibalize a couple of those and rebuild some?

That's a good way to do it cheaply, no?

c

 

[J English Smith]

C, perhaps, but not for me, I have read about the many things that can go wrong with that. But, those with more experience in battery work may want to try it.

I'm nursing my remaining Pismo batteries along as best I can...they are a dying breed!

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

I have two batteries for my 520c, one is dead, the other (from 1999) holds a two hour charge. Go figure.

 

[ElementalChaos]

Makes me miss my old Pismo. It was my first laptop and vintage Mac I ever got, in 2008 when I was 9 years old.

I was a stupid kid and I took off the heat sink, and then it started smoking. We had to toss it but I was smart for once and kept the keyboard, battery, HDD, and DVD drive.

Hopefully one day I will find a Pismo missing parts for cheap and get it working again.

 

[Yeager]

I've looked into rebuilding the battery, it seems that it is quite difficult and not very feasible for long term usage. At least the power adapter isn't huge  I might try to snag a NIB battery in the future, one will show up on eBay every once in a while for $20. I'm pretty bummed out that I didn't do the proper preservation measures to my Wallstreet's battery before I stored it, now it won't charge.

Makes me miss my old Pismo. It was my first laptop and vintage Mac I ever got, in 2008 when I was 9 years old.

I was a stupid kid and I took off the heat sink, and then it started smoking. We had to toss it but I was smart for once and kept the keyboard, battery, HDD, and DVD drive.

Hopefully one day I will find a Pismo missing parts for cheap and get it working again.

I definitely agree, I really like mine!

Thanks for all the help!

 

[almighty_coius]

A long time ago when I had one, I got an IDE to ribbon IDE and used an SSD from an HP Netbook.  The SSD was essentially a cruddy flash-based SSD (maybe around 20MB/s) which hooked via ribbon cable (same type as the iPod's with hard drives) to the internal IDE. I just let it sit there and it drew power from the 44-pin ATA cable.   It was faster than the hard drive, but only just.  It did well booting with OS 9, but due to a low-end flash it took forever for OS X to boot.

If you want, you can track them down. They have 4 large chips, an ATA controller and a LIF connector that accepts a ribbon cable (single-sided).  Then you just need to get a LIF/ZIF to 44-pin ATA 2.5" adapter and hang that off.  I would say the CF-Flash card would probably work better. Getting the 200x - 300x would definitely get you the best speed, but you are looking at $80 USD last time I checked.  I was curious about using one for a camera that I was using (A professional video camera that did 1080p and used either SATA-II SSDs or dual CF-Flash cards that were either UHS-class or 300x in a RAID-0 Config. I opted to get an HDV Sony HDR-FX1 3-CCD 1080i

with MiniDV HD and a FireStore hard drive unit with battery since it was about $3k cheaper ($900 vs $3800 which I dropped into building a Dual LGA-2011v3 16-core Xeon system with DDR4 ECC RDIMMs)

 

[Yeager]

Thanks for the info! I am trying to decide on whether it is worth it to spend the money on the upgrade, but from what I have seen it seems that PATA to M-SATA would be the cheapest route. I may be confused as to what you are proposing though.

Thanks for all the help!