I was reminiscing about all of the software I own that will not run on my 2 GHz Intel MacMini and wondering what I could do to make it useable, once again.
I began using Macs, ‘in the beginning’ … June 1984 … and I’ve been buying software for them, ever since … most of which is from companies that are no longer in business so, they will never make updates that will work with MacOS X.
I’ve also kept some of my favorite Macs from days gone by so that I can still run the old software when I need it.
Specifically, the Powerbook that I am writing this post about is my 1999 400 MHz G3 PowerBook aka bronze keyboard or code named, “Lombard”.
It yields itself to be a wonderful hobby computer to upgrade and bring into the new millennium.
In 1999, it was the state of the art with MacOS 8.6, 128 MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive!
But, today this old PowerBook can be updated to Tiger, MacOS 10.4.11 and 512 MB of RAM and a 120 GB hard drive!
This Mac was the first Apple laptop to play commercial movie DVDs (but could not burn DVDs) but, today an inexpensive DVD burner can also replace this internal, removable drive.
It came before the advent of Airport Wifi cards but because it has a 32 bit PCMCIA cardbus slot it will accept a PCMCIA card for the latest 802.11 draft N WiFi wireless networking connections!
Best of all, with such a huge hard drive, it made sense to partition the it into 3 partitions … one with the original MacOS v8.6, one with MacOS 9 and one with Tiger, 10.4.11. So it is ready for any software!
Now packed with all of my favorite old software applications like PageMaker, Canvas, Wingz, Claris CAD, Write Now and my old Photoshop with all of the amazing plugins that no longer work with the current version, this revival has been quite rewarding!
The most fun of all are all of my old games that run once again! Far too many of these to list!
One thing this model excels at is battery life. The normal battery lasts for 5 hours but you can get a high capacity version that will last for 8 hours. Want more? The DVD drive is easily removable and can be replaced in a minute with a second battery … so, you can run this beauty for up to 16 hours using two extended life batteries! Not bad for a 5 pound, 14″ laptop!
By adding 32-bit cardbus cards for reading my camera’s SDHC cards as well as the firewire from my digital video camera and USB2, it is complete!
Not too bad when you consider that this is a 10 year old Macintosh computer!
This upgrade worked out so well that I’ve decided to shoot a ‘how to video’ showing all of the gory details and tricks I’ve used to set it up. I’ve spent many days researching and finding out just what would work and how to set it all up. When completed the video should save you a week or more of sometimes frustrating trial and error and get you to a finished modern Mac as quickly as possible!
When I’ve finished the video, I’ll post a link to it, here.
