My first PPC Mac...part the second.

[SoyMaxV]

Sweet! 10.4 was probably the most stable OS I ever ran. I should fire up the old FrankenG4DA. It's been a while...

Biggest issue with those old Powerbooks is the battery. Not many options these days.

Tiger still holds its place as my favorite OS of all time. I miss the days of running it on my iMac G5 rev. C

 

[DCBassman]

A 65W charger should be able to deliver stable power without a battery but you might want to reduce consumption.

Reduce screen brightness, turn of kbd light and maybe even remove the non working IDE devices since you also need to run the FW drive.

See the if that reduces USB dropouts.

Also try running the USB sticks through a powered hub.

The only other thing on USB is a mouse dongle. I don't like trackpads at the best of times, but the one on this machine is rather flaky. Largely unusable in the boot picker, for example.

 

[DCBassman]

A 65W charger should be able to deliver stable power without a battery but you might want to reduce consumption.

Reduce screen brightness, turn of kbd light and maybe even remove the non working IDE devices since you also need to run the FW drive.

See the if that reduces USB dropouts.

Also try running the USB sticks through a powered hub.

The FW drive with the OS on is from a powered dock, so no issue there. I've added a powered USB3 hub and as a test, I'm cloning the main drive using Disk Utility. It's very slow, but it hasn't dropped out. Also, the trackpad seems to work properly now.