I'm amazed.

[thomasp]

As some of you may know if you read the "-ve Events" thread, my temperamental PowerBook went in for repair on Friday to (hopefully) have its trackpad and top case replaced due to a faulty temperature sensor in the trackpad, causing the computer to think it was overheating when it wasn't. However, this is an intermittent problem, so it has to be diagnosed first, which can take a few days.

So, rather than be comptuerless, I decided to blow the dust (literally) off my dad's 6 year old iBook. Slight problem, that ran either Mac OS9 very, very slowly (6min bootup time) or Mac OSX 10.1 marginally better. The even bigger problem is that for both of those OSes, you can't get Firefox, or Safari. So, you're stuck with Internet Explorer - the single worst piece of software EVER CODED (it can barely render HTML properly, let alone tables, divs, or Javascript - it doesn't even know the meaning of the acronym AJAX). Half of the websites I visit wouldn't even load on IE, so I had to do something about it.

Cue me trying to install Tiger (OSX 10.4), Apple's current, but soon-to-be-replaced operating system that's about 18 months old, if that.

Trouble is, this iBook doesn't have a DVD drive, and I only have Tiger on a DVD. So, I pinched my dad's laptop (which he uses during the week, so I could only use it at weekends), and "legally" copied the DVD to my firewire hard drive and installed Tiger onto the iBook from the FW HD.

Installer ran fine, ran the software updates, and it's all running perfectly well! Just a little slow at loading a large number of flash-heavy webpages, but that's to be expected.


Here's the specs of the iBook for the geeky:

500MHz G3 processor (My 2 year old powerbook has a 1.5GHz G4 in it)
8Mb graphics card
384Mb RAM
15Gb HD, with 11Gb free after installing Tiger
1024x768 screen res.
12" monitor
Slow-as-hell bus


So all-in-all, I feel I achieved something last weekend :D

And all credit to Apple for designing a modern OS that can run perfectly well on a 6 year old computer.

[FutureWorm]

yeah that's good and happy yay

i think apple will be dropping g3 support in leopard though

[thomasp]

yeah that's good and happy yay

i think apple will be dropping g3 support in leopard though
Yeah, G3 support is going in Leopard.

I just wish I could install Tiger onto the old G3 iMac that my mum uses for internet surfing and emails. That's a 350MHz G3 with the same graphics card as the iBook, but it has 768Mb RAM so should handle things a lot better. BUT, not only does it not have a DVD drive, but it doesn't even have a firewire port, so I've got no hope of ever putting Tiger on it :( (well, that's a lie, I could fork out for the CD version of tiger, but it's not worth it)

[FutureWorm]

actually tiger requires a fw port

[thomasp]

actually tiger requires a fw port
I know - that's why I can't install it on the iMac.

[FutureWorm]

but you said you could install it if you had the tiger install cds???

also lol mac circlejerk

[Pigbuster]

Seeing as this is a mac related thread, I feel as though I am obliged to post.

Nothing to add, though.

[bloopy]

And all credit to Apple for designing a modern OS that can run perfectly well on a 6 year old computer.

What exactly is a "modern OS"?

We've got WinXP running on a computer at home which is 10 years old, but that's pushing it a bit. :p

[thomasp]

What exactly is a "modern OS"?

We've got WinXP running on a computer at home which is 10 years old, but that's pushing it a bit. :p
Modern as in current or very recent. So like Tiger, Leopard, Vista or to some extent XPSP2. Also modern as in something that eats RAM for lunch and has loads of graphical eye candy to give a 64Mb graphics card a headache