Computer experiments
Dec. 12th, 2015 06:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psipsyA few years ago I dusted off my old PowerBook, and did some surgery on it. Replaced a few broken parts (sound board, touchpad, power adapter), added some memory, put a bigger hard drive in, and installed OSX and 9.2, retaining the ability to boot into either one.
Well, I recently found a device that can adapt an mSATA drive to 2.5 IDE. This is important, as mSATA SSD drives are new and much easier to come by than anything IDE these days. So I found a 120GB mSATA, put that in the adapter, cloned everything over, and now I have a 15 year-old laptop running on a shiny new SSD. It even shows up as an SSD.
This is on top of other repairs/upgrades I've done: The original G3 processor daughter card had an issue with failing cache memory and needed replaced. In 2006, I found there was a 3rd-party business that was putting G4 chips on said cards and selling them. I bought one, and it brought the ability to upgrade the RAM all the way up to 512MB.
In 2013, I also tried replacing the battery, but the one I got from ebay wasn't entirely compatible. It was cheap enough that I felt I could just transfer the individual cells from one to the other. Except I never got around to that. Oh well. Those might not be good anymore, if they were in the first place. At this point my best bet is to find some 18650 cells (readily available) with solder tabs and install them myself.
All this for a laptop that can barely go on the internet anymore, and can't play any of the newer video formats. A Raspberry Pi can run circles around it. What does this laptop have going for it that I'm willing to expend such effort? It's one of the last PowerBooks with a SCSI port, and an infrared port. And maybe it's just my ears but it has better sound. That by itself can't really justify it, but then it is my first main computer. Plus the penalty for failure was non-existent.
On the plus side I found that my personal website works even in Netscape on OS 9. It doesn't judge; I made it to be cool like that.
Well, I recently found a device that can adapt an mSATA drive to 2.5 IDE. This is important, as mSATA SSD drives are new and much easier to come by than anything IDE these days. So I found a 120GB mSATA, put that in the adapter, cloned everything over, and now I have a 15 year-old laptop running on a shiny new SSD. It even shows up as an SSD.
This is on top of other repairs/upgrades I've done: The original G3 processor daughter card had an issue with failing cache memory and needed replaced. In 2006, I found there was a 3rd-party business that was putting G4 chips on said cards and selling them. I bought one, and it brought the ability to upgrade the RAM all the way up to 512MB.
In 2013, I also tried replacing the battery, but the one I got from ebay wasn't entirely compatible. It was cheap enough that I felt I could just transfer the individual cells from one to the other. Except I never got around to that. Oh well. Those might not be good anymore, if they were in the first place. At this point my best bet is to find some 18650 cells (readily available) with solder tabs and install them myself.
All this for a laptop that can barely go on the internet anymore, and can't play any of the newer video formats. A Raspberry Pi can run circles around it. What does this laptop have going for it that I'm willing to expend such effort? It's one of the last PowerBooks with a SCSI port, and an infrared port. And maybe it's just my ears but it has better sound. That by itself can't really justify it, but then it is my first main computer. Plus the penalty for failure was non-existent.
On the plus side I found that my personal website works even in Netscape on OS 9. It doesn't judge; I made it to be cool like that.
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no subject
Date: 2015-12-14 05:04 pm (UTC)