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Bought a near mint Pismo

Posted by: Hugh on 2013-02-01 11:14:28 New 32gb KingSpec KSD-PA25.6-032MS SSD arrived yesterday, only 7 days from China to UK 🙂 5 hours last night to do a Carbon Copy Cloner to the new drive in a USB enclosure, and test booting from the USB drive once cloned - it boots fine using the Option key at startup, but not recognized in System Prefs -> Startup Disk 10 minutes spent installing it in the Pismo this morning, half of that time was looking for a flipping screw on the carpet. Booted straight away, seems very snappy so far. Before the new drive I took some timings for various actions - boot-up time to desktop, starting Dashboard, opening a large Excel document, Camino startup time and opening a .jpg with Gimp. Boot-up seems 25% faster, and most other actions about 20% quicker, except for some reason opening Dashboard took 20% longer (but I think it may be iStat was looking for a HDD temp which of course the SSD cannot supply). Battery life should also be even better but only time will tell. On the whole well pleased [🙂] ]'> [🙂] ]'> , just need to find out if I can get trim support, although according to Kingspec this drive already has automatic bad block management, not the same but helps when it gets a little more used. Cheers 🙂 Hugh Edit: Dashboard opening 20% faster now temp sensors disabled in iStat.

Posted by: J English Smith on 2013-02-01 12:14:33 Thanks for the report! Very interesting, I may have to invest in one of these in a couple months. Let us know about the battery life effect after you've had a chance to judge, Hugh. Got a sad surprise yesterday - Other World Computing (NuPower) has discontinued their excellent Pismo-series LiIon batteries. I was going to pop for another of those this year. I have two of their batteries in my rotation, but both have seen many charges. I'll have to eventually take a flier on one of the Chinese-made ones when all of my current Apple OEM ones start to fail... Well, I imagine there are not many Pismo owners who were paying ~$80 for a new battery...

Posted by: Hugh on 2013-02-01 12:23:58 Indeed not, I paid £38 ($60) with free shipping for each of my two eBay batteries, and of course won't know how good they are for quite some time (I hope 8-o ) Cheers 🙂 Hugh

Posted by: Trash80toHP_Mini on 2013-02-01 13:04:12 Gotta love the Pismo. Beater_3/500MHz/768GB/37.26GB/clean install of 10.4.11 was a Craig's list find about three years ago. It came setup to play a DVD automagically when I pop one in and has a WiFi Card that's faster than AirPort. Lots of TLC from the previous owner, it was bundled with a Wallstreet PDQ and a Blueberry iBook. Gotta re-glue one side of the hacked DVD's door back on, thanks for the reminder. I got a second Pismo with a PartsMo just to get the BookEndz Dock for the first one. [😀] ]'>

Posted by: Blessed Cheesemaker on 2013-02-02 15:01:50 OWC discontinued their Pismo batteries? Well, that is too bad...but, I guess it saves me some $$$. Also, I did install and run 10.5 Leopard on my G4 Pismo a while back. It ran ok, but when you needed to do something that required the graphics card, that was where I ran into problems. For example, I could look at iPhoto thumbnails, but when I went to open the photo up in iPhoto to look at it larger, or start to adjust it, it would just come up with a blank screen. Text and other stuff was ok, it was probably a little slower than Tiger, but not by much. I eventually went back to 10.4 Tiger, as the Pismo was my main machine until early 2009, and I needed to get work done on it, and do my iPhoto-ing.

Posted by: Hugh on 2013-02-02 16:04:34 I'm actually pleasantly surprised by Tiger on the Pismo, it's a no frills proper OS X, unlike Lion on the MacBook which is beginning to have a Windows-like feel with all the decisions the OS makes on the user's behalf, and all the fancy extras. If I ever get some sort of G4 processor for it I'm probably not going up to Leopard if it gets stuck on graphics editing - unbelievably I tried installing PhotoShop CS3 yesterday and it seems to be working fine. Cheers 🙂 Hugh

Posted by: Hugh on 2013-02-04 10:59:28 Just bought a 500mhz daughter board from eBay US, but before shipping to me the seller (mac-pro18005253888) will look and see if they have a G4 board. So, pleased with the 500, even more pleased if they can supply a G4. I currently have a 400mhz board, overclocked to 450 (overclocking to 500 gave some KPs) - does anyone with a Pismo know how high you can go with a 500mhz board? I reckon 550 is safe but will it go as high as 600? Cheers 🙂 Hugh

Posted by: Hugh on 2013-02-12 05:35:38 Well, it turned out the seller had a G4 board in stock, and although he wanted an extra $90 I went for it. It also turns out it's a 550, so I might be tempted to give Leopard a whirl, give that I have a Carbon Copy Cloner USB drive to fall back on and that I've proven to boot. I now have a G3 400, 450 or 500 to spare if anybody needs them, although I'll probably keep the 500 just in case. Cheers 🙂 Hugh

Posted by: Hugh on 2013-02-18 02:06:47 Last thing, just in case someone needs to know - the temptation was too much and I installed Leopard, and it runs like a dog 8-o As others have found, only the battery in the right hand bay is recognised. The dock is very jerky, Mail wouldn't open until I applied the 10.5.8 combo, the graphics have slowed down to an unacceptable crawl. Tiger re-cloned back, and the old Pismo is back to quick and slick. Cheers 🙂 Hugh

Posted by: mcdermd on 2013-02-18 09:14:08 As I recall, Tiger on a Pismo with 1GB RAM was always really nice.

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