Spent some time tinkering with some old PowerBooks recently:

• I now have 3 non-working PowerBook 100‘s. All seem to have failed in the same manner (motherboard issues I think). The good news is they are really easy to take apart. The bad news is they use 2.5″ SCSI hard drives… I should be able to sort the motherboard issue out (hopefully).
• I now have a working PowerBook 54oc. I repaired it using parts from a busted PowerBook 520c. It has a 320MB 2.5″ SCSI hard drive and 12MB of RAM. I have installed Mac OS 7.6 on it (will upgrade to 7.6.1 as soon as I can). It is a very nice laptop – especially the active matrix screen. I really like the PowerBook 540c, on-board ethernet and modem (mine has an internal modem installed). Having SCSI, ADB and a serial port is cool also.

I think the biggest problem facing people who collect old Macs (in particular PowerBooks) is the internal 2.5″ SCSI disk issue. These invariably fail and are getting harder and harder to find. Ideally, a SCSI to IDE converter should be made (or even a SCSI to CF adapter) but I don’t think this is going to happen. At least with desktop Macs the 3.5″ SCSI drives can be replaced by more modern SCSI drives (with the appropriate adapters).

NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a fantastic piece of software I have been using to create an installer for a project at work. It is highly customisable and handles both the installing and un-installing of files. From the website:

NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a professional open source system to create Windows installers. It is designed to be as small and flexible as possible and is therefore very suitable for internet distribution.

The software itself is small and integrates nicely with my favourite (Windows) text editor: NotePad++.

I am on a 5GB/month wireless broadband plan from Optus. For the purposes of selling the plan to you, Optus define 1GB as 1000MB (see screen shot below).

For the purposes of billing you, however, Optus define 1MB as 1024KB (also see the screen shot below). This means that they would define 1GB as 1024 MB for data used. Hence the 5GB plan is actually a (5000/(5 x 1024)) x 5 = 4.88 GB plan.

5GB should give you 5 x 1024MB = 5120MB.

Given that excess usage (not that we are at any risk of that) is charged per MB, not shaped, it would be good if they were consistent.

…whether I should upgrade my PowerBook G4 (12″, 1GHz) to Mac OS X Leopard 10.5. I currently have the original 40GB HDD installed, so perhaps I should upgrade that first (given Leopard requires 9GB to install). The G3s I have will all stay at 10.4 for the time being. They are all sub-500MHz so I don’t think any amount of hacking will make 10.5 worthwhile on them.

For the record, I don’t think Apple making the minimum processor required for Leopard to be an 867MHz G4 is unfair. And I have lots of old Macs that can run 10.4 🙂

Edit: I will probably wait for 10.5.1 to come out.

Picked up a 3rd generation 20GB iPod for $140. It is in near-mint condition with good battery life. Will be useful for backing up photos as well (I am only using 2GB for songs at the moment).

Also have a 12″ 500MHz G3 iBook coming – it will need some repairs but will hopefully be functional soon.

Lastly, my B&W G3 PowerMac (350MHz) is finally setup with 512MB of RAM, 40GB internal HDD, 250GB USB2.0 external HDD and a FireWire external dual layer DVD burner. This is now the backup server for all of our photos and other documents.

…can be removed with Isopropyl alcohol and a little bit of effort. The sterilizing pads you can buy at the pharmacy do the job nicely. Thanks to Kylie for sourcing the pads and Cameron for providing the pen marks…

• PowerMac 9500/132 with broken power supply (but with stacks of RAM, 18GB hard drive, Sony SCSI CD-RW drive and two PCI graphics cards);
• Two 20″ Apple CRT monitors (both work well – if you would like one let me know);
• Another PowerBook 100 for parts (non-booting complete unit in very good condition).

I am in the process of building a “hot rod” PowerMac 7500. Full details soon…

After spending some time trying to configure the Beige G3 Server mentioned in my previous post, I gave up and started working on one of my B&W G3s (see here and here for specifications). I suspect my Beige G3 Server has IDE bus issues as I could not get it to reliably boot from the CD-ROM drive (I tried a few different working drives). It is a bit sad that this machine doesn’t work as it is a very nice machine otherwise.

My B&W G3 is a 35oMHz model with a USB 2.0 PCI card and SCSI PCI card fitted. It is running Mac OS X 10.4.9 and I have replaced the stock 6GB IDE HDD with a 40GB IDE HDD. RAM is currently at 512MB (2 x 256MB chips, 2 spare slots) although I may increase this to 1GB (the specified maximum). It is currently configured as a VNC and FTP server (as described in my previous post) and will eventually run headless with an external 250GB USB 2.0 drive for storage.