61–70 of 82 posts
I recently did a similar set of upgrades. I wanted to create a Mac OS 9 computer for my son. So, I bought three untested G4 Mac minis (Late 2005) after learning that there is now a version of Mac OS 9 that has been hacked to run on them: http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?board=127.0 When they shipped they were Mac OS X only. They are actually, with this hack, some of the fastest machines you can get to run Mac…
This is not an easy task. For those of you that don’t know the iBook G4’s logic board and hard drive are essential hermetically sealed in the plastic case AND a second layer of metal. I ruined my first iBook G4 when attempting this same upgrade as the ribbon cables that connect the power button and LEDs ripped in half from age (very brittle). I bought another used iBook G4. It still has the stock 60 GB hard disk and…
The CPU's heatsink is attached via adhesive. That is not "a hermetic seal."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and the HD to an SSD And you still meet the specs of the current Macbook 16 years later.
Until you start comparing the bandwidth/speed of that RAM and SSD, at least…
I had one of these white plastic iBook G4s. My next laptop was the very first “unibody” MacBook Pro 15”, bought from a Thanksgiving sale in 2008. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and the HD to an SSD and it still runs great today. I stopped trying to upgrade the OS so the biggest challenge now is security. Thankfully Firefox has a long-term-stable version that still runs and gets current root certs for TLS.
This is not an easy task. For those of you that don’t know the iBook G4’s logic board and hard drive are essential hermetically sealed in the plastic case AND a second layer of metal. I ruined my first iBook G4 when attempting this same upgrade as the ribbon cables that connect the power button and LEDs ripped in half from age (very brittle). I bought another used iBook G4. It still has the stock 60 GB hard disk and…
I did the ssd upgrade to a G4 PowerBook* and it wasn't that dangerous. Nothing glued. Jut had some geek fun with 2 friends, all worrying about the tiny tiny screws and short and fragile cables.
If the iBooks are glued together, that's a totally different animal.
* unfortunately the GPU needs a reballing and without it the laptop only displays right in cold weather or for the first half an hour since power up :(
It's great fun to put SSDs in retro machines, but I usually opt to use SLC drives for SSD-unaware operating systems. It supposedly can have two orders of magnitude more cycles before the cells start to die. On the other hand, there's lots of conflicting information out there, so not sure if it really makes that much of a difference.
You probably don't run 24/7 disk activity on these retro machines, so SLC is probably not worth it?
I recently did a similar set of upgrades. I wanted to create a Mac OS 9 computer for my son. So, I bought three untested G4 Mac minis (Late 2005) after learning that there is now a version of Mac OS 9 that has been hacked to run on them: http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?board=127.0 When they shipped they were Mac OS X only. They are actually, with this hack, some of the fastest machines you can get to run Mac…
What will your son do with OS9 learning games and such?
This is not an easy task. For those of you that don’t know the iBook G4’s logic board and hard drive are essential hermetically sealed in the plastic case AND a second layer of metal. I ruined my first iBook G4 when attempting this same upgrade as the ribbon cables that connect the power button and LEDs ripped in half from age (very brittle). I bought another used iBook G4. It still has the stock 60 GB hard disk and…
I put an SSD in a MacBook pro late 2009 and I love it! I installed Windows 10 and Ubuntu 22.04. I tried compiling my website with a php/apache and a mariadb containers in docker. I thought that maybe Vite would take forever to compile but no it ran almost the same as my current PC. I was really amazed at how well it all still runs. The main lag I noticed is when you move from page to page the Vite server takes up to…
Tomb Raider Anniversary is from 2007. I wouldn't count it as an indication of how capable the GPU still is.