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Graks

macrumors newbie
Nov 22, 2004
8
0
Norway
my pismo 500 has been running happily for 7 years, but for a month ago the sound out port seem to bee a little bad. I have to bend the cable so i can hear bpth channels... :( anyone know if it is easy to fix?
 

yoda13

macrumors 65816
Sep 26, 2003
1,468
2
Texas
I have one in my closet that I killed a couple of years ago. I was maxing out the memory and putting a new hard drive in it and I must have messed something up, because when I put it back together it it wouldn't work. :eek:

I reassembled it using the old parts and it still wouldn't work. Really made me sad. I was so careful, but I guess not careful enough. I have thought of getting it repaired, but haven't done it yet...:(
 

HowEver

macrumors 6502a
May 10, 2005
854
398
Toronto
My black MacBook is great but I don't want to mark it up. It's on an iCurve on my desk, with an Apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse in front of it.

I'm typing on the pismo now, great couch/lounging laptop. Unlike the poster above, I don't use three hard drives: I use two two-hour plus batteries, and I don't use my expansion bay hard drive. I have 1GB RAM and a 5400 rpm 40GB hard drive.

It's fantastic for surfing, dreamweaver, adobe creative suite, and iLife stuff. I wonder if in 6 years my blackBook will be such a joy.
 

princealfie

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Mar 7, 2006
2,517
1
Salt Lake City UT
My black MacBook is great but I don't want to mark it up. It's on an iCurve on my desk, with an Apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse in front of it.

I'm typing on the pismo now, great couch/lounging laptop. Unlike the poster above, I don't use three hard drives: I use two two-hour plus batteries, and I don't use my expansion bay hard drive. I have 1GB RAM and a 5400 rpm 40GB hard drive.

It's fantastic for surfing, dreamweaver, adobe creative suite, and iLife stuff. I wonder if in 6 years my blackBook will be such a joy.

Until the MacBook gets a 750GB SATA hard drive in it, I will stick to my Pismo :D
 

FocusAndEarnIt

macrumors 601
May 29, 2005
4,628
1,112
The PowerBook G3 Pismo was the best computer ever made by Apple.

Hands down.

I <3 it. I've had 4 PowerBook G3's. :eek: (2 wallstreets, 1 lombard, 1 pismo)
 

macg4

macrumors 6502a
Nov 17, 2003
679
0
Des Moines,Iowa
Im a pismo love myself...i have owned 2 in my mac collecting life...i currently just have one that i use for wireless web browsing,etc... its a 500mhz/1gig ram/60 gig hd/ dvd-cdrw combo drive/ expansion bay hd(12gb)/ 3 batteries.. its a sweet rig and i love it to death. ive got tiger running on it right now and os9...set up as a dual boot...screams in os9 with the gig of ram under the hood
 

72930

Retired
May 16, 2006
9,060
4
As Bruce Almighty would have said: The pismo is B-E-Autiful

Wahoo: I'm a 6502 now
 

macg4

macrumors 6502a
Nov 17, 2003
679
0
Des Moines,Iowa
As Bruce Almighty would have said: The pismo is B-E-Autiful

Wahoo: I'm a 6502 now
yeah even after all these years its still a very good laptop. easy to use expandable and reliable...even fetches pretty high prices in the used market and on ebay even today...amazing indeed :D
 

PDE

macrumors 68020
Nov 16, 2005
2,484
18
It also has those really cool release mechanisms for the bays. When I first got mine I remember thinking that they're going to get caught everywhere, but I don't think it ever happened. The easiest, coolest release levers ever!

To be honest, I feel more excited about the pismo than Apple's recent offerings - despite it being very underpowered by today's standards, the display being kind of dim and whatever.... it's still a perfect computer for word processing, surfing and general productivity. And the only one where owners keep on wanting to extend its life further...
 

macg4

macrumors 6502a
Nov 17, 2003
679
0
Des Moines,Iowa
It also has those really cool release mechanisms for the bays. When I first got mine I remember thinking that they're going to get caught everywhere, but I don't think it ever happened. The easiest, coolest release levers ever!

To be honest, I feel more excited about the pismo than Apple's recent offerings - despite it being very underpowered by today's standards, the display being kind of dim and whatever.... it's still a perfect computer for word processing, surfing and general productivity. And the only one where owners keep on wanting to extend its life further...
yeah not many people doing this with a 6 or 7 yr old pc laptops, thats for sure
 

setso

macrumors member
Nov 29, 2006
51
0
..Pismo (speedup by) nature

..hello you Pismo crew out there
..
just flipping through my old bookmarks ..trashing a lot of info from the early
days of osx on pc (now we have bootcamp) ..i came across some osx tips
for speeding up old (school) machines ..just check them out !!!

If you plan a second monitor connected to your Pismo you might like the
info in one of these speed-up tips:

..........................................................

• RUN A SECOND MONITOR. A quirk I found on my Pismo G3 laptop is that screen redraws seem to speed up when I attach a second monitor running at 1024 x 768, and run a dual monitor desktop configuration. It feels snappier than by using the laptop's LCD screen alone. Go figure.... Perhaps this is a quirk in the ATI graphics chip of the laptop. Perhaps this may also work for you. The speed up doesn't occur at higher monitor resolutions for me.

..........................................................

Performance tuning for G3 Macs: //EDITED: ..this is all in german, sorry ..links below
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20020221092653868

Speeding up Mac OS X:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-1063


..yeah, Pismo ..now i want you back ..little black mo++erfu++er :eek:


added: SwapCop makes really sense to me, since it is always good to have
the swap file on a another drive or partition ..so where is the guy with the
3 drives in his Pismo ?

SwapCop: /Freeware
http://ftp5.de.freebsd.org/pub/i_cd/MacOS/System Utils/Swap Cop 1.0.1/

MacJanitor: Freeware (for nightly maintenance)
http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html

TinkerTool: Freeware (the superb mactuner ..let's do JPG screenshots now ..yeah)
http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html


>>AND give me a buzz if you like the infos
 

xsedrinam

macrumors 601
Oct 21, 2004
4,345
1
I have one in my closet that I killed a couple of years ago. I was maxing out the memory and putting a new hard drive in it and I must have messed something up, because when I put it back together it it wouldn't work. :eek:

I reassembled it using the old parts and it still wouldn't work. Really made me sad. I was so careful, but I guess not careful enough. I have thought of getting it repaired, but haven't done it yet...:(

I've had the pismo 500 mhz since it was released in Feb. '00, and have managed to keep it in the fam by handing it to my son attending uni. Great machine. Your post caught my eye and triggered a couple of things you might check if you haven't already.

1. According to a Road Warrior article, the drive controller in G3 PowerBooks is incompatible with some ATA-6 hard drives. When replacing the internal hard drive, you should be sure to obtain an ATA-5 compliant drive or an ATA-6 or ATA-7 drive known to work with Pismo.

2. Seating the RAM in the second module on the pismo seems to require an unusual amount of pressure to make sure the RAM seats properly with the familiar "click" in place.

Sorry if you've troubleshot these items already, but as a pismo enthusiast I thought it worth mentioning in hopes of a resurrection.
 

macg4

macrumors 6502a
Nov 17, 2003
679
0
Des Moines,Iowa
i have been considering replacing my pismo with a new macbook somehow im having a hard time doing it...i might just keep the pismo and get a macbook as well...thats way i dont have to get rid of it :)
 

baxterbrittle

macrumors regular
Nov 8, 2005
236
1
yeah not many people doing this with a 6 or 7 yr old pc laptops, thats for sure

Actually I have one laptop (amongst many) that I would sort of compare to the pismo. IBM A30P/A31P. I have both and they are quite an interesting machine. Don't get me wrong I LOVED my pismo (moreso than these things) but they are from the same era (roughly). The A30 series are a 3 spindal design but had a seperate battery so you could have 3 HDD's and a battery or 2 batt's and 2 HDD's. 2 HDD's 1 Battery and 1 Optical drive - you get the idea. They also have a pretty OK for their time GPU (Radeon 7500/Fire GL 7800) respectively, coupled to a UXGA display (1600 x 1200) with high viewing angle (IPS Panel). Inbuilt wifi and BT 2 x pcmcia slots and inbuilt video capture. I have a dock which has another drive bay plus 2 more pcmcia slots plus to top it all off you can run a PCI card in it too. Pismo was a fantastic but these IBM's are more expandable and feature rich, I know they can't run OS X (not legally anyway) but don't go thinking that they are the only machine of their kind.

For what it is worth I think that the wallstreet is better than pismo Pismo was great but I just liked the build quality of wallstreet better (were quite a bit heavier though)
 
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