PowerBook G4 1.67Ghz 2GB RAM for high school. Good idea??

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Level 1

4 points

PowerBook G4 1.67Ghz 2GB RAM for high school. Good idea??

Hi again everyone,

I spotted a PowerBook G4 Laptop on eBay for $90. It's a top of the line 15 inch with 1.67Ghz and 2GB of RAM running 10.5 leopard. I had a twelve inch, and it was, well, garbage. It was really slow because it was only a 1ghz with 512mb of ram trying to run leopard, so it was a disaster. Anyways, could this laptop be good for high school? I'm starting the 9th grade this fall and I am planning to get a MacBook Pro with Retina display, but now that I think about it i'm kinda worried about it getting stolen. Here are the things i'll be looking to do on it;

1. Browsing websites

2. Taking notes (I believe office 2004 is the newest version to run on PPC, right?)

3. Listening to music (iTunes or Pandora or something to that nature)

For $90 it seems very compelling to me because it looks a lot like the early MacBook Pros, and it's at a fraction of the price. I'm aware I'll have to be running programs that are a couple versions older, but I don't mind as long as I get those three things out of it. It also seems to be in good condition, here's the ebay link:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-PowerBook-G4-15-PowerPC-G4-1-67GHz-2GB-80GB-/19156 4878358?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c9a281216

I'll have to buy a power adapter with it but I don't mind. They're only like $10 anyways.

I would love to have all your opinions on this.

Thanks,

Erik

Posted on May 4, 2015 1:06 PM

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Answer 1

Allan Jones

Level 9

68,984 points

May 4, 2015 5:47 PM in response to Windowssonic

Your big handicap will be web performance. Our highly-speced G4 Macs are not doing well on the web now, even with the TenFourFox browser and a fast cable connection. Web pages are seldom optimized for a processor Apple abandoned nine years ago. Flash is a no-go except for a hack taht tricked Facebook movies into playing.

Sorry, no Pandora. It requires am Intel processor on a Mac laptop:

http://help.pandora.com/customer/portal/articles/166391-minimum-specifications-t o-run-pandora

What WILL work: simple tasks like using Office 2004. That runs quite nicely on that computer. So will Office 2008, but not current versions. I used Office 2o08 on a 1Ghz Powerbook with 1GB RAM for quite a while.

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Answer 2

sdfox7

Level 2

158 points

Jun 7, 2015 1:53 PM in response to Windowssonic

PowerPC architecture was dropped by Apple 10 years ago, but there are still many ways to make it work because many software developers either dropped it very recently, and some still continue to support it. If you decide to purchase (or anyone else reading this in the future), here is what I recommend:

Office 2008 (you can get copies on eBay and download the patches via Microsoft's website or Software Update)

Adobe Reader 9.4 (which you can then update to 9.5 from within the program): ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/mac/9.x/9.4.0/en_US/AdbeRdr940_en_US_i386.p kg.zip

Firefox 3.6.28, the final version for PowerPC: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.6.28/mac/en-US/Firefox %203.6.28.dmg

iTunes 10.6.3 for OS X Leopard 10.5 PowerPC, http://appldnld.apple.com/iTunes10/041-6244.20120611.BbHi8/iTunes10.6.3.dmg or iTunes 9.2.1 for OS X Tiger 10.4 PowerPC: http://appldnld.apple.com/iTunes9/061-8725.20100722.Bhnyt/iTunes9.2.1.dmg

QuickTime 7.7 for OS X Leopard 10.5 PowerPC, https://support.apple.com/downloads/DL761/en_US/QuickTime770_Leopard.dmg or QuickTime 7.6 for OS X Tiger 10.4 PowerPC http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/QuickTime/061-536 8.20090121.C13C9E/QuickTime76_Tiger.dmg

Safari 5.0.6 for OS X Leopard 10.5 PowerPC, https://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1422/en_US/Safari5.0.6Leopard.dmg or Safari 4.1.3 for OS X Tiger 10.4 PowerPC http://appldnld.apple.com/Safari4/061-9485.20101118.Vfr455/Safari4.1.3Tiger.dmg

TenFourFox, likely the most recent PowerPC designed browser available, based on Firefox 31: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

Also, VLC is a fantastic media player, plays practically any media file that is in existence: http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/2.0.10/macosx/vlc-2.0.10-powerpc.d mg

Flash Player for PowerPC was dropped at version 10 but there are multiple "hacks" available online to make Flash continue to work on PowerPC, simply do a Google search for "Flash for PowerPC": https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23619-flash-version-16-for-powerpc/

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