In our previous episode, Charles Moore's Pismo Has a
Near Death Experience, I had somewhat pessimistically resigned
myself to the possibility that the faithful old Pismo PowerBook I bought used
in October 2001 had reached the end of the road.
The display backlight, which had been progressively succumbing to
the dreaded Pismo
pink screen affliction over the past several years, had taken to
refusing to illuminate at all on bootup or wake-up, with some
apparently associated booting anomalies (see Charles Moore's Pismo Has a
Near Death Experience). A motherboard issue seemed plausible.
Substituting a stock Pismo 500 MHz G3 750 processor and 768 MB of
known good RAM in place of the Wegener Media 550 MHz G4 upgrade and
1 GB of RAM I had installed seemed to help a bit for a few days,
but then the failure to light the screen remanifested. I switched to my
other Pismo and started looking for a good deal on another machine.
However, about three weeks ago I had some rare spare time on a
Saturday afternoon and decided to take another shot at reviving the
ailing laptop.
Replacing Parts
I have a third Pismo with a bad power manager (see The Day the Pismo Died for
that story) board that I've been cannibalizing as a parts mule, and it
happened to have the best Pismo display in the fleet. Since this was a
video-related issue, there seemed to be probable cause to suspect the
video inverter board as a possible culprit, and I knew the video had
been working fine in the parts Pismo up to the point where the power
manager got fried by an arcing extension cord.
Pismo video inverter. Image © iFixit
Happily, as with many Pismo internal components, the video inverter
is very easy to get at and a snap (in some respects literally) to
replace. Once the inverter is out, swapping the display screen complete
with its screen lid bezel is simplicity itself, involving removal and
replacement of just four easy to get at screws, so while I was at it, I
took the opportunity to switch the pink-tinged display with the good
one from the parts computer.
To keep variables to a minimum, I stuck with the 500 MHz G3 CPU and
768 MB of memory, and after I buttoned everything back up, the Pismo
booted nicely, and the screen lit as it should. The entire operation
had taken about half an hour start to finish.
Upgrades Reinstalled
I ran for a week with that configuration until I was reasonably
confident that the problem had been successfully dealt with, and the
next Saturday found a moment to swap in another processor daughtercard
with a FastMac 550 MHz G4 upgrade, and to bump the RAM back up to the
maximum two 512 MB RAM modules for the full gigabyte that the Pismo can
support.
All is working splendidly. In fact, never better!
The excellent display is a treat after viewing through a rosy tint
for several years, and the FastMac G4 CPU is a bit more lively than the
Wegener Media unit I had been using or the Daystar G4 upgrade I have in
the other in-service Pismo that is used mainly as my road computer and
for scanning and disk burning. (For an overview of Pismo G4 upgrades,
see WallStreet and Pismo Processor
Upgrades: Do They Make Economic Sense?, published in 2004.) Michael
Lowdermilk, Business Development Manager for FastMac Performance
Upgrades, Inc., told me that the difference is that FastMac uses 333
MHz Motorola/Freescale G4 7410 chips slightly overclocked to 500 MHz,
while the chips used by his competitors are 500 MHz 7410s overclocked
to 550 MHz.
FastMac's Hot Upgrade
The only downside to this setup is that I find the FastMac G4
upgrade runs significantly hotter than the Wegener and Daystar G4
upgrades, which results in more fan activity, which is to say any fan
activity at all. With the Wegener unit, the Pismo's cooling fan might
cut in two or three times a year during the hottest days of the summer,
but with the FastMac, it's been several times in the run of a week, and
the summer is well past here now.
I hate the
fan cacophony, but the faster performance is nice, so it's a
compromise. Come the warmer weather, if the fan activity gets too
tiresome, I may be motivated to go back the the Wegener G4, which
really isn't much slower, but for now - over the next six months or so
- that's not something on the agenda here in northeastern Nova
Scotia.
Years to Go
I'm still going to try to find a deal on a Pismo in good condition
for a spare, since I've now stripped my parts machine to a degree that
I probably won't try reviving it. I think Pismos still have a few years
of useful life left before Mac
OS X 10.4 Tiger and PowerPC become too obsolete for serious
general-purpose computing.
I don't use these old laptops out of sentimentality, but because
they are a functional tool that does everything I need them to do - and
I find them more ergonomically comfortable than any other computer I've
ever laid my hands on (and economical as well). For example, I drafted
most of this column on my "road" Pismo while waiting for my wife in the
dentist's office. It's not the lightest machine for that purpose, but
it is reasonable to carry.
Browser compatibility will likely prove the eventual tipping point.
For now, I'm finding Opera 10.63
the highest performance browser for OS X 10.4, notwithstanding some
PowerPC compatibility angularities (most notably a bug that can summon
the spinning beachball if you try to enter text in a field too
quickly), but on the balance I find it faster than any other
Tiger-compatible browser, and it seems to be more economical of memory
footprint than, say SeaMonkey, which is my number
two browser choice, but which gets slowed down with virtual memory
access after the system memory stack gets filled up by open
applications.
However, version 10.6x will be the last of the Mohicans for Opera's
browser on PowerPC Macs. The new Opera 11 I'm using on my Intel
MacBook, still in public alpha status, does not support PowerPC.
Consequently, the old Pismo does not have an unlimited future as a
production platform, but for the present I'm going to continue enjoying
mine.
