It also has a reliable CD-DVD burner, and it’s a great Mac for exchanging files with various different sources, since it’s equipped with two USB 2 ports, a FireWire 400 and a FireWire 800 port, and a PCMCIA card slot (I use a PCMCIA CompactFlash adapter to quickly exchange files between this PowerBook and the PowerBook 1400, for example). The 17-inch 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4 - It’s the fastest, most capable G4 I have, and I use it for pretty much the same things I use the 12-inch for, but when I either need a bigger screen or power is more important than portability.I’ve used it for writing, email, Web, some image editing and even for watching videos and movies when I was on holiday last August. The 12-inch 1 GHz PowerBook G4 - still my lightest, most dependable machine when out and about.Speaking of Macs of more recent vintages, my four most used PowerPC Macs in 2016 have been: The ‘new’ PowerBook Duo 280c (generously donated to me in February 2015) is working fine and I’m using it mainly as a font database server and as a very portable solution to download and manage the photos taken with the QuickTake 100. One day maybe I’ll get a better display assembly on eBay and fix this issue, but as you can imagine, it’s not exactly one of my top priorities. The PowerBook 5300 still works fine, but opening and closing the lid has become really problematic due to cracks in the hard plastic of the display assembly near the hinges, so I’m using this Mac only occasionally. It has a bright display, a fantastic keyboard, and it’s the quickest machine to take out when I have to check old media (it has a floppy module, a ZIP 100 module, and a CD-ROM module, so it’s easy to just insert the one I need and get going), or when I have to pass files from one vintage media to another when I need to perform some kind of data retrieval. (If you have a spare IDE drive in good health, of at least 60 GB capacity, please let me know.)Īs for the older Mac laptops, the PowerBook 1400 with upgraded G3/333 processor remains my most used portable Mac of the pre-PowerBook G3 era. Repetitive mechanical noises during the boot process are a certain sign that it’s failing. A minor problem has just occurred with the Power Mac G4 - its internal hard drive is on its way out, only managing to complete the boot occasionally and with effort. Sadly, yet another power supply in the DuoDock II has failed, and I still haven’t had the time to take care of the problems afflicting the Quadra 950. Touching wood, the older group of beige Macs - SE, SE/30, Classic, Colour Classic, LCII, Performa 630CD, Power Macintosh 9500 - hasn’t manifested any faults or new issues after the latest check-up. My smallish collection of vintage Macs had a good year. And a good friend sent a care package with a few more interesting bits in it. A little rescue mission ended up adding a good old Dual 500MHz Power Mac G4 and various assorted accessories to my collection.A hard drive I’d long considered dead (to the point I forgot it still was inside my Power Mac 9500) came back to life on its own and it’s still working.I was able to bring both of my old iPods back to life by updating their storage with Compact Flash cards (8 GB for the iPod mini, 16 GB for the third-generation iPod). However, as far as vintage computing goes, I can’t complain at all. Overall I’m glad to be leaving 2016 behind, as it wasn’t a particularly great year.
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