Looking at Powerbook, good or bad idea?

[ayeying]

So one of my Aunt's is retiring her 15" PowerBook, 1.25GHz G4 and I'm looking at picking it up and use it as a secondary system with my Air.

I don't really expect much from something that old. I'm thinking probably of just using it for:

iChat/Adium
MSN Messenger
iTunes
Microsoft Word (for skool of course)
Mail/iCal/Address Book
and some light websurfing

Pretty much freeing up my air for more intensive tasks such as virtual machines and of course, windows for gaming.

While the air isn't the best system for something like this, but I don't know. A free Powerbook is hard to pass by on here

Any opinions?

 

[Consultant]

I would take a free PB.

Clean install.

Good for your own use or to lend to PC people if you create an account for them.

 

[NC MacGuy]

It should handle those just fine. Anything not flash based I find works acceptably well on my 1.5GHz PB. Even though I've put Leopard on them, I've reverted to Tiger.

 

[brendu]

i had leopard running smoothly on an iBook G4 with lower specs than that, for free youd be foolish not to take that.. it will do all those tasks with no trouble. you may want to max out the ram if it hasnt been yet.

 

[GoCubsGo]

iChat/Adium
MSN Messenger
iTunes
Microsoft Word (for skool of course)
Mail/iCal/Address Book
and some light websurfing

School.

Yes, I think the PB is a perfectly fine computer to handle all of this and probably even more. It will feel like an elephant next to that Air though. Plus, now you can take your Air in and have it repaired while using your PB for presentations.

 

[SMC1991]

It still has life in it. The problem today is that new software has become so bloated that 1.25GHz Single cores can't do the same tasks today they could do fine years ago.

Don't install the latest everything on there (Office 2004 vs 2008, for example), which makes things lighter weight. I think Tiger will make that thing scream, I'd advise against Leopard, which was notoriously poor on PowerPC.