iBook G3 Clamshell 466Mhz: Good Enough For Word Processing and Web Browsing?

[htg]

Essentially, I really dislike any recent laptops that Apple has made in terms of design (MBP and MBA), with my two favourites of all time being the iBook G3 Clamshell and the Powerbook G4 Titanium.

If I get the 466Mhz SE edition of the former, max out the ram (to 576MB) and upgrade the hard drive, what will it do?

I'm only looking for web browsing/checking my email/Wordpress blogging and word processing. There is the Flash issue present on all PowerPCs, which I can hopefully resolve with this hack (as posted on MacRumors). If that doesn't work, then I'm happy to just use something like MacTubes for YouTube and struggle on with everything else using Safari or even use a text only browser.

How smooth will it be? I'm not looking for anything phenomenal, all I need is for it to work for the purposes I mentioned above.

 

[miles01110]

Depends on how feature-rich (or really, feature-bare) you want your browsing experience to be. That iBook isn't going to run any kind of streaming media very well, nor are you going to get the "modern" GMail/facebook/Twitter/etc experience either. The browsers available won't support it.

 

[htg]

I would probably use a desktop client to check my email, and for Facebook and Twitter, I tend to use my iPad, so that's not a big deal.

As I said, I can use a desktop app for YouTube, so it's really just keeping up with the news. Also as I said, worst comes the worst, I can use a pure text browser, which should run fine (correct me if I'm wrong).

 

[MagicBoy]

Sounds like the iBook would be of very limited usefulness, other than for word processing. I'd push all the internet, social media use to the iPad and stick OS9 on the iBook.

 

[Jessica Lares]

Get the Powerbook G4 Titanium, you will enjoy it much more and it'll be much easier to use.

The 466 is great, I have one myself, but you really don't want to be stuck on Tiger if you don't have to. And making sacrifices by using text based browsing, is such an insane idea. The G4 will handle multitasking a lot better, and you will find loads of PPC software for it than you would for the G3.

 

[estrides]

G4 Titanium FTW! avoid the clamshell. Its cool as a museum piece, but in terms of enjoyability and amount of frustration, the G4 is better.

 

[htg]

The problem with a G4 Titanium is that 1GHz models are pretty difficult to come across. I'll narrow my internet use on the iBook G3 down to one thing as i can do everything else on my iPad: Wordpress. Yes or no?

 

[Intell]

I have a 350Mhz G3 iMac. It can still be used on light web pages like MacRumors. But anything with more than two GIFs is out of the question. It cannot do any Flash or YouTube. Even MacTubes struggles. It can barely do Facebook as long as you don't mind really laggy pages with long loading times. Twitter is slightly better than Faceboon, but after a page or two of tweets it starts getting slow. Tumblr? No, just no. Office 2004 runs well on it. Office 2008, not so well. iTunes 9.1 works great on it for music playback and the iTunes Music store is usable as well.

 

[Goftrey]

The problem with a G4 Titanium is that 1GHz models are pretty difficult to come across. I'll narrow my internet use on the iBook G3 down to one thing as i can do everything else on my iPad: Wordpress. Yes or no?

If the 1ghz are becoming to hard to find a 867, 800 or even 667 will do word processing (fab keyboards), YouTube, Leopard (my 800mhz TiBook ran Leopard brilliantly with LeopardAssist), emails and everything in between. The clamshells in my opinions have to the end of their life for usefulness & serious productivity and are more collectors items now.

A Titanium is the way to go - great keyboard, G4, Leopard, gorgeous displays & the speed you'll get will be worlds apart.

 

[01mggt]

Honestly I think everyone is right. I am currently using a Powerbook g4 12" Aluminum with 867mhz and 1.2gbram with 64gb ssd. It is plenty fast for most tasks. However even browsing the web on this can be very painful. Anything more complex than the macrumors web site just bogs the system down no matter which browser I seem to try. Now on my ibook g3 I can boot into os9 and use the clasilla browser and it screams even with just 802.11b wifi. However if you need java enabled it too will slow the computer to a halt on more demanding websites.

 

[Ariii]

I agree with the OP on this one. It can still do the mobile version of YouTube pretty well, you actually CAN do FaceBook, but you can only really have a couple tabs open at once. I recently used mine with Debian, OS 9, and OS X, and it performs decently, word processing isn't much of a challenge, and WordPress is still viewable. This is at least my experience with 366 MHz with 192 MB RAM. Use Classilla if you have MacOS 9 on it; if not, use Camino or Opera. I recommend using Debian with OpenBox or FVWM if you're not satisfied with MacOS 9/X. I'm using one to type up my book and it's pretty nice for that, you can even do some light photo editing if you use Photoshop 5.0. They're also fine for IRC if you use a lightweight client. It can't handle a lot of the internet security protocols out there. However, this can be solved by getting a USB dongle, if you're on Tiger this should work: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833166052

 

[htg]

I agree with the OP on this one. It can still do the mobile version of YouTube pretty well, you actually CAN do FaceBook, but you can only really have a couple tabs open at once. I recently used mine with Debian, OS 9, and OS X, and it performs decently, word processing isn't much of a challenge, and WordPress is still viewable. This is at least my experience with 366 MHz with 192 MB RAM. Use Classilla if you have MacOS 9 on it; if not, use Camino or Opera. I recommend using Debian with OpenBox or FVWM if you're not satisfied with MacOS 9/X. I'm using one to type up my book and it's pretty nice for that, you can even do some light photo editing if you use Photoshop 5.0. They're also fine for IRC if you use a lightweight client. It can't handle a lot of the internet security protocols out there. However, this can be solved by getting a USB dongle, if you're on Tiger this should work: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833166052

That's what I thought. I will do most of my web browsing on my iPad, I'll only need it for stuff like Wordpress and word processing which you can't do on an iPad. I don't need it to do the job fast, I just need it to do the job. It's by no means meant to be a primary machine, just something I can type on.

What about TenFourFox as a web browser?

 

[Intell]

TenFourFox is one of the best if not the best web browser for PPC Macs. It's fast, well optimized, and still kept up to date.

 

[tom vilsack]

I own two clamshells...

-if you want for collectors then yes...if you want for internet then no (unless)

-stay away from osx,as you will need min tiger in order to run tenfourfox,lastest camino ect...and trust me it will be painfully slow...try even yahoo's main page and you will be left waiting...you can go with osx panther,in which case safari and older camino will work,but prepare for lot's of script errors and once again painfully slow web pages (unless something simple like macrumors,craigslist ect)

-therefore if you do buy a clamshell...install mac os 9.2 and then install classilla web browser (i rec older ver 9.2.1)...yes web pages will still load slowly,but compared to osx,it will feel like a speed demon...you will also want to install "usb overdrive",which is a program that will allow your mouse scroll wheel to work...a must using classilla.

 

[rossmosis]

I wouldn't solely rely on my 466mhz Lime, but for basic web browsing (Google, forums, Craigslist, eBay, email), games from that period (mostly found on macintoshgarden.org), and word processing, it does just fine. Make sure to max the RAM, install Tiger, and change the hard drive.

 

[Ariii]

What about TenFourFox as a web browser?

If you're going to use TenFourFox, stay away from the latest version, because TenFourFox does exactly what it claims: brings you the latest version of FireFox. And that's good if you have the specs for it, but the newer versions of it run slower because they have all the features that Mozilla has integrated into its web browser. Mozilla has a rapid-release cycle where they're all based off of FireFox 4 in general. FireFox lost updates for PowerPC after 3.6. So, getting an earlier version of TenFourFox should run fast enough and render pages fairly well. You might want to try iCab as well, and LowEndMac has a couple articles on web browsers on the PowerPC platform.

 

[Lil Chillbil]

G4 Titanium FTW! avoid the clamshell. Its cool as a museum piece, but in terms of enjoyability and amount of frustration, the G4 is better.

I disagree I use a PowerBook 3400c as my main laptop and it works great for Text only web browsing/email/Office 98