At the fatal drip of Browsers and Web/Cloud-Clients

[bobesch]

Back to the roots today I revived my old Asus Travelmate 800 (Celereon 1,3GHz) from 2003 with a new mSATA and a first-time and fresh installation of Windows7pro to make it another VPN/RDP-Client for work.
It had been delivered with WindowsXPpro and had been quite a responsive notebook with XP.
The style "resembles" the Pismo-PowerBook - it's quite funny to see that now, 13 years after purchase... (so they had been 3 years back copying Apple )
Otherwise the Travelmate is really sturdy.
It took the whole day to install Win7, SP1, another tiny update and a huge Dr.Windows-Rollup-Update of more than 70 single updates to catch up with the recent security updates. (The official Windows-Update routine didn't work at all ...)
Despite setting up the machine was really time-consuming and boring I'm now stunned to see how everything is working- and I have to admid, that basic things do work on this old machine, which are abandoned and legacy on the more powerful PowerPC-Macs, like:
- Browser
- Dropbox
- OneDrive
- GoogleDrive
- iCloud
- latest FireFox (with iCloud Notes/Todos, G-Drive etc)
- LibreOffice5
And it's only because of adaptions of browsers and cloud-clients are left alone on PPC-OSX and even on the 32bit-intel-iMacs with Lion.
WHAT A SHAME!!! to make this fellow and capable hardware obsolescent ...
On the other hand it shows how MS had been dedicated to and bound by serving backwards compatibility to make even this 13yo machine cope with recent tasks, while PowerBooks rely one the "last man standing" Cameron Kaiser to keep Firefox alive with TFF.
But it takes a lot of effort now to get the then latest updates for any Windows-versions: Win2k, WinXP and even Win7 since the business of MS is changing rapidly and now leaving legacy stuff behind the way Apple does ...
Anyway - it's all about browser and web/cloud-clients to make old hard- and software die...

 

[Gamer9430]

Up until this past year, even XP has much more support than Leopard. XP had up to date Chrome, FireFox, and many other apps. In comparison, Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion we're all axed too. Lion and Mountain Lion came out AFTER Windows 7 and already got axed because Apple urged Google and Mozilla to end support on those OSes. Also in comparison, many Mac users stay on the cutting edge in terms of OS since the process has become so much easier since Snow Leopard brought the App Store. Windows users lag behind on upgrading OSes because the process is beyond tedious and expensive. Thus, OSes like XP have been supported for a record 13 years by Microsoft, and even longer by other companies, like Google.

 

[647156]

From back when iTunes 12 was released, this wasn't even XP versus PowerPC but XP versus Snow Leopard - says it all really when Apple themselves support 2001's XP for longer than 2009's Snow Leopard (and the 2006 hardware that can run a maximum of it, whereas XP will run and is indeed even supported by MS on a mid-1990s Pentium - though the iTunes installer may well have higher minimum specs coded into it):

Microsoft will continue producing updates for XP (in the form of Windows Embedded POSReady 2009, a flavour of XP designed for embedded systems though it works fine on normal PCs too - there was a simple registry tweak that makes normal XP tell Windows Update that it is POSReady and so receive its updates, I haven't looked into whether it still works but it definitely worked after the end of regular XP support) until 2019 - can you imagine Apple still updating 10.1 Puma until then...

 

[bobesch]

I guess I will close that chapter about resurrecting my old 2003 Travelmate with Windows7.
Starting with a fresh installation followed by an downloaded SP1 and a "Rollup-Update" from "Dr.Windows"
I ended with a corrupt system just at the moment, when the inbuild updater took action and installed a few further updates.
That made memories of all the frustrating time spent with updates, installations etc come back in a second.
No SuperDuper or CCC in case of swapping the harddrive ...
The first impression had been promising:
latest Firefox (with working browser-based Outlook/iCloud/Google ), Dropbox, iCloud, GoogleDrive, OneDrive ...
fast Office2000, latest LibreOffice5. But YT-video "out of the box" didn't work (I didn't spent any effort to find out any workarounds...)
So the Travelmate will end solely as a stupid RDP-client - it will be only a matter of time, until progress of browser, certificates and cloud-services will leave Win7 behind too.
But I wish, PPC/Leopard would at least offer those for Cloud-storages in full range, like that old Win7-book does. Plus iTunes ...

Compared models:
Travelmate800 (2003) 1,3GHz CelereonM 1,25GB RAM; Win7pro (2009):
PowerbookG4 12"(2005) 1,5GHz PPC 1,25GB RAM; Leopard (2009).

-------------------------
UPDATE:
In most instances the problem is sitting in front of the screen ...
Today reinstalled Win7pro plus SP1-pack again and skipped the rollup-update pack and everything (including further updates) worked like a charm...
(I also had been very cautious creating a system-Image after each major step!)
But the Travelmate feels much slower than the >1.2GHz G4-Books with Leopard and video is not an option (though I used to view TV/mpeg2-stream back in 2005).
The uttermost nagging thing is to see the icons of my favourite cloud-services sitting nice in a row in the lower left corner of the taskbar (showing their corresponding folders are in sync), where Leopard fails to offer equal options despite of it's overall superior speed and power...

 

[Imixmuan]

Why Windows? You can pretty much have everything with mention on that Travlemate with Linux, with guaranteed support for the OS and the core apps till April of 2021. Personally I'd go for something light, like LXLE or Lubuntu 16.04 LTS. It would still be a very, very capable road machine, and without 90% of the associated headaches that come with Windows. You could easily theme it to look like a mo-dern mac, but I guess you could do that with Windows 7 too. I suspect Youtube playback at 360p inside a browser would be a non issue on Firefox with Greasemonkey, Viewtube and a plugin like VLC or Mplayer. SMtube and mplayer would likely get you to 480p fullscreen. Just sayin'.

Apple abandoning older but perfectly good hardware is why I moved away for good, I do still love PowerPC macs but only for nostalgia and legacy purposes. Now I determine when the damn machine is obsolete, not Tim Cook.

 

[bobesch]

Why Windows? You can pretty much have everything with mention on that Travlemate with Linux, with guaranteed support for the OS and the core apps till April of 2021.

It's kind of "never change a running system... " Yes, I like to work with Linux, but the Travelmate is intended to be used as a VPN-Client to connect via RemoteDesktopClient to a Win2008-server at work. Running XP in the past and now Win7 let me do local print-outs as well. To get the whole thing running with Linux would be even more efford than to go through the hassel of installing Win7...
The option to be able to connect to my favourite cloud-services let me keep all Travelmate stuff in sync and available for my other computers so I don't have to run an extra backup-routine.
I run Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on an old eee-book. It's really fast and performs well for browsing, email and on the multimedia-side and also for screen&filesharing, but I would have to start again from the scrap to get everything work the way I need it. (Today I got stuck at the hurdle of a full /boot partition I I couldn't really figure out how to remove old Kernels to make updates work again. The learning curve is really steep).
For my paperless-office at home and to store a huge amount of searchable scanned journals an i7 intel-macbookpro / fujitsu-scansnap and DEVONthing are currently my basic equipment at home . The G4 Books and a 2008alu MacBook are meant for daily use and on the go and I'm gonna miss the option to use Dropbox on the G4s, if Czo's Hack wouldn't work anymore (despite of the option of webDAV).
It's simply annoying that the PPC are cut off iCloud/GoogleDrive/OneDrive even if they could cope with those routines with ease ... But the share of PPC-users obviously is to small to make Apple/Google/MS care about supporting them any further

 

[hellothere231]

Why Windows? You can pretty much have everything with mention on that Travlemate with Linux, with guaranteed support for the OS and the core apps till April of 2021. Personally I'd go for something light, like LXLE or Lubuntu 16.04 LTS. It would still be a very, very capable road machine, and without 90% of the associated headaches that come with Windows. You could easily theme it to look like a mo-dern mac, but I guess you could do that with Windows 7 too. I suspect Youtube playback at 360p inside a browser would be a non issue on Firefox with Greasemonkey, Viewtube and a plugin like VLC or Mplayer. SMtube and mplayer would likely get you to 480p fullscreen. Just sayin'.

Apple abandoning older but perfectly good hardware is why I moved away for good, I do still love PowerPC macs but only for nostalgia and legacy purposes. Now I determine when the damn machine is obsolete, not Tim Cook.

I don't know if this is just me, but on my old windows hardware, for example, my Thinkpad R51 (1.8ghz Pentium M, 1.5gb ram) seems to just run faster on Windows XP than Linux for me. I've tried Puppy Linux, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, and Debian on it, but XP just seems to run faster; plus, using the unofficial Service Pack 4 update which changes some registry settings to make XP look like POS 2009 to Windows Update, I can still get updates until 2019. I do like Linux (although it can be a pain sometimes to get certain drivers/programs working), but it seems like Windows XP runs better than many Linux distros on my older hardware for me.

 

[Imixmuan]

I don't know if this is just me, but on my old windows hardware, for example, my Thinkpad R51 (1.8ghz Pentium M, 1.5gb ram) seems to just run faster on Windows XP than Linux for me. I've tried Puppy Linux, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, and Debian on it, but XP just seems to run faster; plus, using the unofficial Service Pack 4 update which changes some registry settings to make XP look like POS 2009 to Windows Update, I can still get updates until 2019. I do like Linux (although it can be a pain sometimes to get certain drivers/programs working), but it seems like Windows XP runs better than many Linux distros on my older hardware for me.

Well that makes sense, if you think about it. You are using an OS on hardware that was designed for it, and, lets face it XP's user interface is now what, 15 or so years old, so by todays standards its very lightweight. Even with Puppy or Lubuntu there's going to be a lot of stuff under the hood that will chew up processor cycles. You have some control over that of course. AntiX is a very lightweight Debian based distro that might work well, I had it on a Dell D620 with similar specs and it flew. The web is the real problem with old hardware these days, with bloat bloat everywhere. As much as I like keeping the old hardware, PowerPC or Intel chugging along, there are times when it just doesn't make sense anymore, and its time to move on.

 

[AmazingHenry]

Well, the market share of those old Windows versions probably has something to do with it. Anyway, all of the things in your list are still supported in one way or another on PPC Macs.

Browser

Leopard-WebKit or TenFourFox works great, especially if you use eyoungren's tweaks.

Dropbox

There are workarounds.

OneDrive

Use it with TenFourFox

GoogleDrive

Just like OneDrive.

iCloud

I can't remember the name, but there's an app that will run on PPC and sync with iCloud calendars, contacts, and other things. Also, you can go to icloud.com or create foxboxes for iCloud web apps.

That's from my dock.

latest FireFox (with iCloud Notes/Todos, G-Drive etc)

TenFourFox. I know it's not the latest, but it supports iCloud Notes and Reminders and I would assume G-Drive as well (although I haven't tested it).

LibreOffice5

Older versions of LibreOffice work great.

WHAT A SHAME!!! to make this fellow and capable hardware obsolescent ...

I agree on "WHAT A SHAME!!!".