I have an Aluminum FW800 G4 Powerbook (specific specs are 1.25Ghz G4, 512Mb RAM, SuperDrive) that I recently replaced the original hard drive. I've gotten alot of use out of it, but at this point the battery holds a whopping 7 minutes of life with everything turned off. It still runs Tiger pretty snappily. I'm starting Grad School in the fall, in Software Engineering, and I'm wondering if I should pick up a new battery and some RAM (which is DDR SO-DIMMs, so somewhat pricey), or should I just pick up a new machine?
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My experience with the G4 and software development with Java (which you will probably encounter in Software Engineering) was that these were just too slow (even if for other things they were just fine). Only with the Intel chips Java development started to work out on the Mac for me. | |||||
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Personally I'd buy the battery and memory, since the machine will be fine. I've got a 667Mhz powerbook which I did the same to. Shop around and buy second-hand memory and the memory+battery will be a fair bit cheaper than a new machine. In all, it depends on how much money you have "spare". | |||
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The new Intel-based Macs are quite awesome. You can run virtual machines in them (Linux, Windows, GNU-Step, etc) and would make for a great college laptop. I say: sell the MacBook as-is on eBay and use whatever you can get out of it towards a new MacBookPro. | |||
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I was just given a 1ghz 12" G4 powerbook by a friend who got himself a new macbook. Battery was completely shot. Ram was maxed out to 1.25GB already. I put a few hundred in it. Was worth it to me. I bought a third party replacement battery, power adapter and Leopard from Other World Computing (OWC). The battery works great, it gets me more than 4 hours. Tinker Tool lets me turn off most of the Leopard prettiness to speed it up. Disabling spotlight (ignore the article, read the comments for the correct way to do it) helped a little to, but I might soon turn it back on. Firefox was kinda slow for me so I actually tolerate Safari. Unfortunately, google gears does not work with it, so no offline gmail. I later decided to upgrade the hard drive. Everything I read said solid state disk doesn't deliver miracle speed or battery life. So I went with a 320 gb hard drive. I've yet to install it. I could have gotten a new low end laptop for the amount of money invested. However, I doubt I could match the battery life of a G4, have a 12" screen, a DVD drive and had as much fun if I was using windows, linux or bsd. | |||
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