Death of a Pismo, End of G4 Upgrades, 13" MacBook Pro Assessment, and More

• Death of a Pismo
• ATA 100 Hard Drive in Pismo
• End of G4 Upgrades
• Eudora 6.2.4 Works Like a Champ
• 13" MacBook Pro

Death of a Pismo

From Tom:

Hey Charles,

Your articles continue to be the most interesting to me at Low End Mac (and other sites where your work shows up), being knowledgeable about the legacy Macs as well as sharing your experiences with the newer models, like the Unibody MacBook, one of which I may own myself one of these days.

Not long ago you mentioned the presence of a dead Pismo laptop among your Macs, which you intended to use for a parts machine. Was this your long-term Pismo or a newer acquisition, and how did it die?

As one who loves the incomparable Pismo (who is, in fact, typing this on a near-mint Pismo 500 MHz), I'm curious about the incident of its death and whatever you know about the cause.

Keep up the great work!

God Bless,
Tom

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the kind words about my scribbling.

I highly recommend the new 13" MacBook Pro based on my experience so far with the Unibody MacBook.

As for the Pismo, here are the broad strokes of what happened:

I'm hesitant to blame the Pismo itself. It wasn't with the one I bought in 2001 (currently my wife's machine), but rather my second Pismo, which I had purchased from Wegener Media in May 2007. This was a very nice example with a flawless and bright display had a really superb-feeling keyboard, apparently having been little-used since its manufacture in January 2000.

This machine had served as my "road computer" for 15 months or so, as well as performing utility tasks like disk burning, since it had an 8x dual-layer disk-burning SuperDrive expansion bay module that was faster than the one in my G4 PowerBook. It also got a 550 MHz G4 processor upgrade card and a 100 GB Seagate hard drive. It worked great on WiFi hot spots with a Buffalo G54 802.11g Wireless CardBus Adapter.

Anyway, returning home from a road trip in late August 2008, I plugged in the Pismo's power adapter, and a few moments later I began to hear a sort of snapping, popping sound, which, upon investigation, turned out to be coming not from the computer but from the extension cord where I had the power adaptor plugged in. I unplugged it, and the noise stopped, but the adapter plug prongs showed signs of electrical arcing. Uh-oh.

I woke up the computer, plugged it into another AC outlet, and and everything seemed to be okay. The battery was charging, and it went through a couple more sleep/wake cycles with all seeming well, but when I left and returned a few hours later, the green sleep light had died, the computer had shut down, and the battery appeared to be dead. I tried rebooting, but no joy. Not even a startup chime.

I tried swapping in a different battery, and the Pismo came to life, but the PRAM data had been lost, and it died immediately when I pulled the battery again. I tried two other power adapters, known good, but the computer wasn't recognizing them.

The logical deduction was that the electrical arcing at the cord plug had somehow fried the Power Manager board through the power adapter. Incidentally, I also tried several hard Power Manager resets and the trick of of unplugging the PRAM battery, but with no success.

Another possibility I suppose would be that the power adapter itself had developed a fault and caused the arcing. I wasn't about to try it with a healthy Mac in case that was what obtained and haven't used that adapter since, so it's still a bit of a mystery, but my best guess is still that the extension cord socket caused the trouble. That cord has been retired as well, needless to say.

I consulted my hard copy of iFixit's Pismo teardown guide (no longer in print, although the online version can be downloaded as a PDF) and discovered that the Power Manager board resides in the most inaccessible bowels of the Pismo. Wegener Media had these boards listed for $79, but when I contacted David Wegener, he mentioned that when the charge board went, it could have blown the logic board as well, which he says is a common issue if the DC board goes, so replacing the charge board alone seemed like a roll of the dice, and an inconvenient one at that, requiring a complete teardown of the Pismo. I opted instead to buy another Pismo from Wegener Media, just a case and chassis with the motherboard, charge board, screen, and keyboard, but no processor card, RAM, hard drive, battery, or expansion bay device. The price seemed reasonable compared with what a charge board alone would cost, and doing it this way it was sure a lot easier and less hassle.

Happily, the "new" Pismo worked just fine and continues in the role of road laptop and utility machine today. It took me a leisurely 20 minutes or so to swap in the components from the ailing Pismo, and it booted right up. Cosmetically, it's not quite as good as the one it replaced (David described it as an A- quality unit - a few scuffs, etc.), and it shows signs of having seen more service, notably some of the dreaded keyboard contact marks on the display surface, although they're not visible with the screen lit, and and there are no dead pixels.

The keyboard looked fine, but it wasn't nearly as good as the other. It's notable that the three Pismo keyboards I now have all have a significantly different feel. They're all better than average as computer keyboards go in general, but the one for the Pismo I purchased in 2007 is the best by a substantial margin, with the well-used one from my 2001 purchase second-best, and this latest one bringing up the rear. No problem. I just swapped the best one over, easy to do.

I will be a lot more careful in future about ensuring that I'm getting a clean AC feed to the power adapter before connecting my computers.

The charge board and, if necessary, the logic board in the damaged Pismo could, of course, be replaced and that machine brought back to life, but you do get into the dynamic of the hammer that lasted so long, but had its head or handle replaced from time to time. A computer is really just an assemblage of parts, and the damaged/failed one will now be consigned to the role of parts mule.

Charles

ATA 100 Hard Drive in Pismo

From Scott:

Hey Charles,

Today I loaded OS 9 on the Pismo with the new Seagate 120 GB 5400 rpm ATA100 hard drive in it. I didn't have any trouble. I'll try to put OS X Panther on it tomorrow after I get OS 9 all straightened out. I don't foresee any problems with the ATA100 hard drive though. I'm using a Seagate ST9120822A hard drive, if that matters to any of your Pismophile readers out there. I can't remember what kind of hard drive you were having trouble with in your Pismo, but my experience has taught me that Seagate is the best hard drive on the market. I'm not gonna badmouth that other brand of permanently sale priced hard drive that my friends buy . . . and lose all their work on! haha.

Scott

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the report, and glad to hear that it's working out for you.

I've never had any problem with hard drives in my Pismos. I currently have a Seagate 100 GB in my Pismo, and there's a Toshiba 40 GB 5400 RPM unit in my wife's Pismo. Both have been completely reliable, as were the smaller capacity units they replaced. In fact, I've never had a hard drive failure in any of my laptop Macs, dating back to 1996.

Charles

End of G4 Upgrades

From Henry:

Hi again, Charles,

As several people have noticed, G4 upgrades are disappearing. The reason is that Freescale (formerly Motorola) Semiconductor has quit making G4 chips. When store stocks are sold out, you will have to find a used one.

Henry

Hi Henry,

That certainly explains it!

I thing some of the upgrades still available are using recycled G4 CPUs, so that may be a resource that will hold up for a while yet.

Charles

Eudora 6.2.4 Works Like a Champ

From DC:

I have and still use Eudora 6.2.4 on all my computers including this Intel MacBook, the last one before the Unibody, using OS X 10.5.5 (my editing software prohibits my upgrading at the moment) without problems of any sort. It checks multiple accounts daily. However, I have never used it with a modem other than a 3G USB from Vodaphone and another from O2 while in the UK. Do you really use dialup in this day & age?

I intend to keep using Eudora but realise it may not work for much longer.

dc

Hi DC,

I suspect that my problems using classic Eudora may indeed be related to an issue with my dial-up service. Eudora 6.2.4 has not ever worked properly, even on my PowerPC G4 PowerBook, since I installed Leopard in 2007. I still have OS X 10.4.11 "Tiger" installed on that computer on a separate hard drive partition, and Eudora still works fine booted from it, so it's definitely a software issue. On the Unibody MacBook with Apple's USB modem, it refuses to check mail and is unstable (unexpected quits and lockups) as well. Eudora 8.0b6 and Thunderbird work reliably.

And yes, I am still obliged to use dial-up because that is all that's available in this neck of the woods. If I lived nine miles distant in two different directions I could get DSL service, but it's not available in this small community, and the local Telco has no intention of setting it up, since they might (optimistically) get 20 customers within the service range, and I'm told that installing the required switching substation upgrade would cost Can$187,000, so there's just no business case (no cable TV here either, for similar reasons). It's slow dialup too - 25,400 bps on good days, thanks to ancient rural copper phone lines and the aforementioned antique switching apparatus. In 2006 (latest stats. I have on hand), some 22,000 households and 5,000 businesses here in Nova Scotia were in the same boat, although that has improved substantially since then.

Satellite is the only current potential workaround, but it's punishingly expensive. We have been promised wireless broadband by the end of this year, which is now nearly half over. I'm hopeful, but not excessively optimistic.

Charles

13" MacBook Pro

From Torie:

It sounds like Apple have just released your perfect 'Book. Will you be making the switch? I think the new MacBook Pro line is Apple's most compelling since the switch to Intel (maybe even ever). These prices are just the answer to Microsoft's add campaign. With the announcements of Snow Leopard's new abilities combined with an ultra-low price for current Leopard users, it represents another stone launched square between Goliath's eyes.

I think it has become glaringly obvious the difference between the two companies ideologies. Microsoft is distancing itself from the Vista moniker with an underlying OS that is essentially the same, while Apple has shown faith in it's operating system by choosing a name both familiar and telling of the nature of the update. The name Snow Leopard is as obvious as it is brilliant. The summer 2009 MacBook Pro line and Snow Leopard's pending release may represent the straw that finally broke the camel's back.

Let me know what you think about the current MacBook Pro line and Snow Leopard. Ciao!!

Hi Torie,

Yes, the new 13" MacBook Pro probably is about as close to perfection as I can think of in a laptop. I already like my 13" Unibody MacBook a lot, and the new Pro is even better.

Am I sorry I made the leap four months ago? I have mixed feelings. This computer has been a joy, notwithstanding the no FireWire frustration, and I really needed to move up to an Intel Mac, so I'm not second-guessing myself too much.

If I could get a sale for this machine without taking too much of a loss, I might be persuaded to switch up, but I don't think there's very lively hope of that. My provisional target is to replace my number one system every three years, and that's still my plan with this one, so we're looking at 2012, by which time there could very well be a whole new generation of Apple laptops.

Snow Leopard should be great, although a friend of mine who downloaded and installed a bootleg copy of the latest WWDC developer build says it breaks about one-third of the applications he uses, so there may be an awkward interval of transition.

Charles

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