I have this old Apple PowerBook G4, with a 867MHZ PowerPC CPU. It's one of the first Apple aluminum laptops from several years back. This one came with OS-X 10.2 Panther OS installed. By default it came with 256 MB of RAM and a 40 GIG hard drive. Not bad for the times.

My son bumped the RAM up to 640 MB, the supported maximum amount you're supposed to be able to upgrade to. He also did video editing on it, amazing at the time. But then, the iMovie program was used to working on this level of machine.

But as time goes on, software increases in its feature set and increases its demand on CPU and memory resources. It seems that back then, web video would play just fine on this little machine. But what is happening, is that with the increasing speed and capabilities of new CPUs, the software is using this additional horsepower to perform improved presentation speed and compression into smaller file sizes. In fact decoders like the Flash decoder and many H.264 MPG decoders all require more CPU horsepower. And since most of the media players you download today, use these more improved codecs, it's harder and harder to play video on older or inadequate machines.

So these older computers get pushed aside in favor of faster ones. But looking over the specs, these old computers are not much less than some of the brand new netbooks being offered today. So what we must do is look over the landscape of the applications available for the netbook arena and pick and choose efficient applications to revive the older laptops to at least perform as well as a typical netbook.

Netbooks are not targeted at video editing or heavy game playing, but usually web browsing, email and word processing. As I've written before, these tasks are routinely performed in the cloud, using a single browser application. Recently Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome have been updated with faster rendering engines and quicker Javascript execution. Which means that the same web applications run faster. This cannot but help slower machines keep up with today's demands. As we focus on using lower powered netbooks and pushing the cloud to do most of the work, our old computers can be placed into service once again.

Which brings me back to the 12-inch Apple PowerBook. This laptop came in 3 speed versions, 867MHZ, 1 GHZ and finally 1.5 GHZ. I also have a 15-inch PowerBook that runs at 1.5 GHZ and use it every day. If you have any of the 1 GHZ or better PowerBooks, they still have some life in them. So the question was, does the lowest end of the PowerBook G4 laptop have the guts to still be a cloud contender?

First up was to see if it could run the latest software from Apple. Sure enough the specs are enough to allow Leopard OS-X 10.5 to be loaded on it. And if so, then many applications I like to use can also be loaded on it. The latest Safari 4 browser, which claims to be the fastest out there today will run. There are a few plug-ins I like to use with Safari, (see previous posts here) and so Leopard had to be used for that.

From my searching across the web, I realized that this laptop could in fact be upgraded with a 1 GIG RAM module to bump the total to 1024+128 MB or 1.12 GIG of RAM. (Seems Apple didn't tell us that the hardware supported a full 1 GIG memory add-in.) This now matches the normal amount installed in todays netbooks. Since Leopard used more RAM to run than Panther required, the RAM boost put Leopard back in the game, performing as good or better than the original OS did.

Now the 867MHZ CPU speed is slower than todays usual 1 GHZ CPUs, but not by much. With some wise configuration and settings, I think it performs just fine now. I still can't watch most YouTube video at full speed, but neither can some of the netbooks out there. So for the basics, it fills the need.

Since I love the keyboard on these aluminum PowerBooks and can't get them any longer on any Mac nor find from any third party source, I'm determined to keep the two I have working for as long as I can. Since Apple's statement that the next version of OS-X, dubbed Snow Leopard will only be for Intel-Based Macs, it seems that 10.5 is the end of the road for this little guy. But maxed out with over a gigabyte of RAM and running the speediest browser to date from Apple, I think I can get a few more years out of it. Especially if the Cloud-based computing fad stays strong.

Long live PowerPC based applications!

I wanted to pump up my Safari browser today, so I went shopping for plug-ins. Since the recent Safari 4 release, I thought I might try to see if it could keep up with Firefox in my daily browsing chores. So in order for this to work, there were some critical functionality that needed to be plugged into Safari. I mainly use Macs and as such if Safari can share some of the chores that I had to use Firefox for, maybe the Safari browser can breathe new life on the Rowland computers.

First Up, Sharing Bookmarks

I had been using Google bookmarks up until now. In Firefox there is an add-on called GMarks, which pulls from Google Bookmarks and displays them on your browser menu. However, in order to keep them sync'ed with your other computers, you have to maintain and add new bookmarks to "Google Bookmarks" all the time. You can't use the browser bookmarks feature.

In Comes XMarks

This extension (formerly FoxMarks) is a bookmark synchronization add-in for Firefox. It actually loads and stores the browsers regular bookmarks up onto a server, to share between all your computers using the same account. So normal "bookmarking" in your browser will update the server, and therefore your other computers will get the updates next time it checks in. This used to be exclusively for Firefox, but now a Safari plug-in has been created and so now Safari can share the same bookmarks with FireFox automagically. The Safari plug-in is only for OS-X, so running Safari on Windows won't be able to see the bookmarks, but Firefox on Windows, Linux and OS-X can now share with Safari on OS-X. This works for me. Left out in addition to Safari on Windows, is Google Chrome and there is no Safari for Linux yet. See xmarks.com

Glims Adds a Cocktail of Features to Safari

In a previous post you saw that I had an issue with Safari on Windows, regarding the open new window feature. Well, that hasn't been solved, so I don't plan to use Safari on Windows very often, however another Safari plug-in call Glims, adds a great many feature enhancements to Safari, so much so, that it makes it almost nicer than FireFox. Again only available for OS-X, it takes care of some lesser issues like getting a real full-screen window effect, selectable search engines, and search suggestions and results right in a drop down, so you can click directly to the site, without actually stopping at the search engine page. Sorry Google. See www.machangout.com.

Ad Block, Ad Block, AD BLOCK

The last but certainly not the least feature I needed with Safari is to block ads. I don't begrudge the sponsors of websites, but I have a limited amount of bandwidth on my current EV-DO modem service. By blocking the ads, I can really save a lot of data transfer. Firefox had an add-on called AdBlockPlus, and it works very well. Sure enough, there is now a Safari plug-in that adds AdBlock to the browser. See burgersoftware.com.

If I use a site pretty regularly, I may disable AdBlock in order to generate my share of ad impressions. But rarely if ever do I click on ads, so I'm not causing a great loss of income for those sites if I do block their ads. I've joined and paid for many sites and shareware software, so it comes out even in my book. That said, with AdBlock turned on in Safari, Google ads still show up in Google and Facebook ads still show up in Facebook, so it seems selective at this point.

Those are the BIG THREE for me to get Safari up to speed and extended for my use. Hope these comments can help you too. There are more Safari plug-ins available at pimpmysafari.com.

While Apple may have discontinued support for the lowly Powerbook G4, mine still has some life in it. In fact I have two Powerbook G4 laptops, a 15" and a 12". The hard drive stopped spinning up on my 15" and so I have replaced the harddrive with a new Western Digital Scorpio 250GIG drive. I'm currently reloading all my goodies on it and am writing this post using the old faithful laptop.

My 15" Powerbook G4 runs at 1.5 GHZ with 1.25 GB of RAM. Now with a 250 GIG hard drive, it loaded up OS-X Leopard just fine and all of my favorite software add-ins and applications loaded and run fine. So it still runs the latest state of the art software.

My 12" Powerbook G4 is only 867 MHZ and 640 Meg of RAM. I reloaded OS-X Tiger on it, and that machine runs just fine also. It doesn't run the latest video at real-time speed, but for Internet surfing and email and word processing, it is just as good as any netbook out there.

These laptops still support firewire, bluetooth, USB and can still burn DVDs. The 15" can still drive a DVI monitor. The 15" inch Apple laptops also seem to be the most seen laptops in TV shows and movies.

The best thing I love about the PowerBook G4 series of laptops, is the keyboard. Apple doesn't offer it anymore and I wish they did. I will keep these laptops running for as long as I can, since I can type on them the easiest of all my keyboards. The new flat keyboards that are offered by Apple now on all of their laptops and desktops, while nice looking, is slightly awkward for me. I'd rather have sculpted keytops instead of flat tops. That's just the way I see it. Keyboards are a personal thing, it's your interface to the computer.