Last fall, after I repaired the display power inverter in my aged
utility workhorse Pismo
PowerBook, restoring it to good working order, I hoped that it
would settle down for a while, and so it did, sort of.
While I had it apart, I decided to replace the Wegener Media G4
processor upgrade with one from FastMac that uses 333 MHz
Motorola/Freescale G4 7410 chips overclocked to 550 MHz (the chips used
by competitors are 500 MHz 7410s overclocked to 550 MHz), although I
didn't really notice much tangible speed improvement.
What I did notice is that the cooling fan, which theretofore had
only cut in on the hottest summer days, was now activating several
times in a computing session, roughly every half hour - and it's
winter.
I originally attributed this to the "hotter" FastMac chip. I hate
fan noise, and the Pismo's fan is particularly raucous, so the constant
cycling began to really bug me. A couple of weekends ago, I had a few
spare moments, and I spent ten of them or so popping the FastMac
upgrade out and the Wegener one back in back in.
However, to my dismay, the fan remained very active, coming on more
than it had with the FastMac CPU installed if anything. Evidently, the
processor wasn't the culprit. That went on for about a week, at which
point one morning the screen wouldn't light up when I tried to wake the
Pismo from its overnight slumber.
Bummer. After ten years of mostly faithful service, had the old
laptop finally croaked? Motherboard failure? Dead hard drive?
I decided to try the FastMac processor daughtercard again, and that
yielded success, with the machine booting up normally after reassembly.
I decided to run System Profiler, but when the "About This Mac" screen
came up, it showed that the system was only addressing 512 MB of
RAM.
That wasn't right, since at the time of the power inverter repair I
had also installed a second 512 MB RAM module, to bring the memory up
to the Pismo's maximum 1 GB.
Off with the keyboard again; out with the heat shield, and I removed
the upper RAM module, replacing it with the 256 MB stick that had
resided there until a couple of months ago. Upon reassembling and
rebooting, "About This Mac" showed the system recognizing 768 MB of
memory, so the issue there had to be a defective RAM card, which
probably also would explain the mysterious refusal to wake up from
sleep.
Not only that, but the fan hasn't cut in once since I replaced the
RAM chip, so bad or dying RAM was evidently the culprit there as well.
I have four 512 MB PC100 Pismo RAM modules, one of which I purchased
from Other World Computing several years ago. The provenance of the
other three eludes me.
The old Pismo runs out of breath somewhat sooner with 768 MB of RAM
as opposed to the 1 GB I have my other "road" Pismo. However, the
restoration of silent (except for the hard drive) running is a
blessing, so I think I'll just live with the status quo for a
while.
I perceive that it's getting very late in the day for these old
machines. The Pismo is still a great pleasure to use, but there are no
really satisfactory up-to-date browsers left that are comfortable
performers on a 550 MHz G4 with 8 MB of video RAM (I'm finding
OmniWeb 5.10
the best performer among browsers that still actively support PowerPC
and OS X 10.4 lately).
I suspect that the Mac App Store, which is of course not accessible
with OS X 10.4, will alter the landscape of the Mac world more
profoundly than we realize yet. The curtain is getting ready to lower
on PowerPC, but I'm hoping for a last act that will do the old platform
justice.
After more than a decade, it's hard to imagine being without a
Pismo.
