PowerBook Pismo G4 question

[Atariangamer]

Hey,

So I got a Powerbook G3 Pismo from a friend, and when I got it powered up, it had a G4/500 in it. This was really interesting to me, but compared to my PowerMac G4 with the exact same specs and all, the Powerbook lags considerably. I couldn't find anything on the original hard drive to keep (I would have noticed something like MACh Speed Control), so I reformatted and installed a clean OS 9.2.1. But it still felt a little slow.

I can't think of any way to tell which company did the upgrade, and I'm currently on the hunt for OS X 10.3 discs so I can get a little better optimization in speed and compatibility. But while I'm waiting for them to show up, I noticed alot of talk about things like MACh Speed Control, CPUDirector, L2CacheEnabler, and other such things. I thought it'd be worth trying to get and use one of em to see if maybe my G4 could be UNLEASHED.

Well, no. All three of these are incredibly hard to install and use....and that's after if you can even find em! MACh Speed Control, I tried buying a modern license but their site is so broken now a days...it kept asking me to do the same thing over and over and I never got anywhere. CPUDirector needs OS X to do anything, I believe, because while stating compatibility for OS 9...you can't run the files under OS 9. L2CacheEnabler can work on OS 9, but has a problem that requires either OS X, or for you to have the utiliity that came with your upgrade. As I have nothing like this...what do I do?!


I'm guessing maybe I'll just NEED to go to OS X to get the speed I'm thinking of, but I'm keeping OS 9 just because of how sleek it is to me. This PowerBook is really a nice computer, I'm glad I got it. I'd just like to get the max power from it, because I'm a video editor (and I like me some AltiVec powered editing).

Any information would be appreciated!

 

[pigoo3]

Hey,

So I got a Powerbook G3 Pismo from a friend, and when I got it powered up, it had a G4/500 in it. This was really interesting to me, but compared to my PowerMac G4 with the exact same specs and all, the Powerbook lags considerably. I couldn't find anything on the original hard drive to keep (I would have noticed something like MACh Speed Control), so I reformatted and installed a clean OS 9.2.1. But it still felt a little slow.

Regarding the speed of this laptop compared to your Powermac G4 (you didn't mention the Powermac G4's cpu speed which could be considerably faster than the laptops 500mhz cpu). Of course the laptop is slower. Laptops (until more recent Intel Macintosh laptops) have almost always been slower than a similarly equipped desktop Macintosh's.

These older laptops (compared to a desktop) had:

- slower ram
- slower logic board architecture
- slower video hardware
- much slower hard drives

Then add to this the fact that this laptop is an upgraded G3 laptop...which means that even though it may now have a G4 cpu in it..."at heart"...it's still a G3 computer...with a slower G3 logic board.

In any case...this is a 10 year-old computer...and worse yet...a 10 year-old laptop computer (which will be even slower). It will run OS 9 and OS 9 based programs VERY well! You can actually install up to OS 10.4.11 on it...but it's going to run it VERY slow. Older versions of OS 10 (OS 10.1, 10.2) were pretty "clunky"...and OS 10.4 is still pretty expensive to purchase (and it would run too slow as well).

If you wanted to install a version of OS 10...I would suggest not going any further than OS 10.3...but even 10.3 may run pretty slow.

Face it...it's a 10+ year-old laptop...it has it's limitations.

- Nick

 

[Atariangamer]

Oh, I know its not going to be super blazing, but its not as responsive as I'm thinking it should be. I've got several computers, and only two of them were made within the last 8 years. I know not to expect i7 speeds from a G3, but still...

I've got a G4 GigE 500DP with 768MB. And it acts alot nicer in OS 9 than this book does. And aren't they both 100mhz systems? (or is the PB still...66?)

But I've heard people say 10.3 is probably my best bet. i've had tiger on this and its nice, but most of the stuff I'd like to do with this thing (simple video editing, web browsing, typing) would run terribly on 10.4, so 10.3 seems nice to me.

My main reason was finding if there were any of these chip controller programs availible somewhere, because if I am missing some cache or something, I'd like to have it -_-;

 

[harryb2448]

Put more memory in the Gigabit Ethernet and Tiger will be much better. It can handle up to 4x512MB modules.