Macopinion

The Road Warrior Mailbag - May 27, 2008

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Charles,

Greetings from my old PB G3, aka, Kanga! Running OS 9 - which I almost forgot how to configure it’s been so long (whew, this thing has a terrible keyboard!).

We are computing on very thin ice right now; wife’s G3 800 Mhz iBook died, and all we have now is my Pismo and this Kanga. My organization has a few Power Mac G4s, 933 Mhz, 512 RAM, 60 GB drives for sale, in-house, for $250.00, so I am getting one of those in a few weeks. It will be my first desktop since the LC III, circa ‘95 or so. I will have to get a monitor for it, but can still use the monitor with our future MacBook purchases. And, the PowerMac will keep me going at home for some time I hope. Going from the Pismo to the G4 PowerMac should be fast for me!

I had a time getting online with the Kanga, but finally made it this morning. Had to use IE (ugh) until I could find iCab 3.05, still made for OS 9. I am on using the built in ethernet from my home office network - cable modem. Speed is fair with the Kanga, actually, not bad. But, boy do I miss OS X!! I wish I could get X to run on this thing, but only have 96 MB RAM, and it is expensive and hard to find RAM to take this thing up to its maximum of 160 MB to run X under XPostFacto… I just might give it a try though, if I can find the RAM.

Through all of this, I have come to the conclusion that the iBooks were some of the worst Macs Apple ever made! Both of our iBooks died - wife’s with inverter cable and probably logic board, and daughter’s died last year with the second logic board failure. First one was covered under the logc board repair progarm, but too late now.

Anway, I can wait for a while now with the Kanga going again and the soon coming G4 desktop to tide me over. I will probably wait until after WWDC, and maybe until August/September to see what kind of new MacBook they might have. Don’t want an aluminum though…

Hi Jim;

Sorry to hear about the iBook. My old 700 MHz iBook G3 is still going strong in its sixth year of service, now as my wife’s computer. We must be lucky, as that model has one of the worst statistiacl reliability records, and this example has neve missed a beat. It has a gazillion hours on it and the (IBM) hard drive is still quiet.

However, my daughter’s late 2003 G4 iBook has succumbed to the logic board flu.

Yes, those keyboards in the 5300/3400/Kanga were pretty mediocre, although I really like the trackpad button on those machines.

By the way, do yourself a favor and download a copy of Netscape 7:02. We’ve found it the most satisfactory browser to use with OS 9 machines. The DL site is here:
http://browser.netscape.com/releases

With the Montevina chip rollout now set back to July and perhaps into August, I’m not anticipating any new Apple ‘Books until fall, perhaps well into the fall, although a MacBook Air refresh will almost certainly come before then - perhaps as early as WWDC.

If I were betting, I would have to put my money on an aluminum housing for the next MacBook. I’m kind of on the horns of a similar dilemma, wondering whether I should just buy a Penryn MacBook now or wait and see what comes in the fall and probably still buy a Penryn MacBook. An aluminum case wouldn’t deter me, but I’m not a fan of buying the first version of anything, and there is specualtion that they might go with MacBook Air type styling that would necessitate leaving features out - possibly the FireWire port, which would be a deal-breaker for me.

Charles

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