Review: PowerBook G3 “Pismo”
For those of you who follow me on twitter, you know that I was given a Powerbook G3 “Pismo” (aka Firewire) , and so even though it’s eight years old, I wanted to write a review on it. First off let me give you a little background on this specific laptop, because of its age, its got a few specific issues with it. First, the screen suffers from “Pink Screen,” and it also suffers from flickering and if the brightness is turned up enough, it’ll go out until the computer is put to sleep and then awoke. Finally, the battery and DVD drive don’t work (however, the battery is to be expected).
Specs
The Pismo features a 400MHz G3 Power PC Processor, 640MB of RAM (it originally came with 64MB), a 10GB Hard Drive, 1 MB Cache, and 8MB of Video RAM. Overall, the Pismo isn’t too slow of a computer, especially being eight years old, and in it’s day it was probably one of the fastest laptops you could find. It’s easy to forget, that this laptop was primarily sold to the Pro market, therefore it had to be speedy enough to handle anything its users threw at it. This PowerBook is running 10.4.11, and running it at incredible speeds!
Performance
As I mentioned above, the PowerBook was a laptop that had to be able to handle high-end graphics work, and therefore Apple tried to make sure that this laptop was always running the latest and greatest processors. When I was told that the machine was running Tiger, I thought to my self, “Well its great that it’s running a modern OS, but it’s going to lag like crazy!” Well, by the time it had finished booting for the first time, I was already eating my words, this laptop booted extremely quick and I’ve not seen a lot of lag. Firefox 2 was already pre-installed on the laptop, and just for kicks I decided to upgrade to Firefox 3. Even though the laptop meets system requirements, it just didn’t end up working quick enough, so in the end I downgraded back to Firefox 2. As long as you’re being reasonable, the Pismo is a very speedy laptop.
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