Adding new luster to the old PowerBook.
In my last article, I shared the reasons
I want an Intel-powered Apple laptop - and why I don't yet own one.
This time I'd like to go over how I made myself happy again with my
existing PowerPC-based portables, adding new capabilities and
increasing performance for a lot less money than that new IntelBook
would cost. I'll go over the modifications I made to my 12" and 15"
PowerBooks, the costs and benefits, and what remains to be
done.
I mentioned gaming as something that I want to do on my small
laptop, and this remains a real challenge. My 12" PowerBook is the fastest model
Apple ever released in that size, running at 1.5 GHz. While there
is a 1.67 GHz upgrade available from Daystar for the 12" PowerBook,
but and extra 170 MHz just isn't worth the $440 cost of the
upgrade, even if it does give me the minimum specs to play
Quake4.
That doesn't mean that the machine can't be made faster, and if
I were still the owner of an older 1 GHz 12", I'd probably go for it
(a 67% speed boost is a much better value).
A Fast Hard Drive
While the processor on my 12" isn't worth speeding-up, the hard
drive certainly is. Last year Apple upgraded from their usual 4200
RPM laptop drives to faster 5400 RPM drives, and this made a
significant performance improvement. Two-years-ago, I had upgraded
the 40 GB 4200 RPM drive in the 1 GHz 12" PowerBook I had at
the time to an 80 GB 5400 RPM drive - exactly the one that came
with my current PowerBooks.
The faster drive made a big difference in performance. The
computer booted up significantly faster, applications launched
quicker, and any disk-intensive function seemed to just fly.
With that logic, I had a 100 GB 7200 RPM Hitachi TravelStar hard
drive installed in my 12" PowerBook, and just like with the
previous upgrade, the performance gains were real and noticeable. I
haven't tested battery life yet, but after two hours I've still got
a 54% charge, which is about the same as I saw with the 5400 RPM
drive, so I'm guessing any penalty will be in the 4-5 minute range
rather than 40-50.
More Memory
The other boost that I gave my 12" PowerBook was a RAM
injection. PowerBooks like mine came with 512 MB of RAM, sufficient
for most users on the applications that a small laptop is used for.
I bumped mine all the way to 1.25 GB, the maximum, and while it
isn't any faster for one or two applications or booting up, there's
no performance hit to leaving multiple applications open.
No, I still can't crank up the detail in Doom3, which is
actually playable with everything at minimum, but I can play
it with my two email clients also running, providing me with
notifications when email arrives.
I've played games while doing large downloads and suffered no
performance hit, something not possible before the upgrade. As a
side benefit, the 80 GB 5400 RPM drive went into a $50 USB
2.0/FireWire enclosure to give me a large and fast backup
solution.
My 12" PowerBook is faster and more capable than it was before.
With my iSight camera in a small pouch on my bag and a short 12"
FireWire cable (not as convenient as the built-in iSight on the
MacBook), it's still a very convenient and capable mobile
video-chat platform.
A Better SuperDrive
I did one other upgrade that gives no performance benefit, but
it adds a long-desired feature - I swapped the built-in SuperDrive
for a different model. Apple's PowerBooks and MacBooks use
Matsushita (Panasonic) optical drives in most applications, and,
sadly, these drives are impossible to flash firmware on.
Now if these drives did everything they are advertised to do,
this wouldn't be an issue, but the fact is that most Matsushita
SuperDrives, though rated at 8x, only burn at 2x unless you have
either Apple's DVD-R media or get very, very lucky on third party
media. The drive in the 12" model also lacks the ability to burn
dual-layer disks.
Finally, while this is possibly illegal and definitely voided my
warranty, I wanted a drive that I could remove the RPC-2 firmware
and replace with RPC-1 firmware, meaning a region-free drive.
I'll go into the how-to of making a flashable drive region-free
and software alternatives in another article, but for now suffice
it to say that my 12" PowerBook not only burns all media at full 8x
speed (including dual-layer), but that it's now region free and can
switch between region 1 and region 3 movies without limitation.
Since watching movies is my other in-flight activity, this
is huge plus for me.
The flashable drive, for those interested, is the Pioneer
DVR-K05, which in addition to its speed and format versatility
compared to the stock Matsushita UJ-845E that came with the
PowerBook, is also quieter and smoother in operation. In all, a
very nice piece of hardware.
One final recommendation: Don't open up and install these pieces
into the 12" PowerBook yourself, as it's a very tough job to get
everything lined up properly on reassembly. I paid a local
authorized Apple shop to do the install, and they charge a flat $90
to open and reassemble aluminum PowerBooks.
If you're doing an internal upgrade, it makes sense to wait
until you're ready to do all of them at once. It cost the same $90
to install the faster hard drive and the Pioneer DVD burner
as it would for either drive alone.
Andrew J Fishkin, Esq, is a laptop using attorney in Los Angeles, CA.
