Introducing the Pismo
I am very pleased to say that I have acquired a working Pismo G3 400! It is in good condition, with only a bit of scuffing and some aging on the top rubber surface.
The battery doesn't charge and the internal DVD drive is a bit flaky, but otherwise, it is a gorgeous PowerBook and one that I have always wanted since first meeting in 2001. This black, curvaceous beauty arrived with only 128MB of RAM (2x64) and surprisingly booted into Tiger off the bat. I wouldn't recommend anyone run Tiger with less than 256MB though, it gets clunky.
First up, I removed the noisy 6GB stock IDE HDD and put in a 40GB 4200rpm spinner donated from my Titanium PowerBook G4 along with a 256MB PC133 SO-DIMM surplussed from the same donor machine. Even though the Pismo RAM is PC100, the PC133 appears to clock down perfectly fine.
The next stage was to install a plethora of systems on this old road warrior. After reading @LightBulbFun's adventures in running Mac OS 8.6 on a Pismo with a home-made G4 upgrade, I thought I would give the old OS a try. Read my results on that thread if you're interested (I got OS 8.6 working, but it introduced thermal issues).
A fresh install of Tiger went on, along with all of it's updates and my favourite Tiger compatible applications. I did the same with Panther system updates and software, and then Mac OS 9. I'll put Jaguar on it next and also try out early developer previews of Mac OS X and Rhapsody just to see them in action.
Mac OS X Tiger
I can confirm that currently with 320MB of RAM, Tiger does feel "heavy" in the same way that Leopard feels heavy on any PowerBook G4. It is totally usable though, but it has a general low framerate when moving windows around and some lag when starting up anything requiring more graphical oomph than the 8MB ATI Rage Mobility 128 chip can offer (like Dashboard). I've ordered in another 512MB SODIMM, so maybe this will help. I have tried switching between Better Energy Savings/Normal/Better Performance and the difference is negligible. I don't think the 400Mhz PPC750 had a stepping feature as found in the iBook G3s.
Mac OS X Panther
Panther is beautiful. Everything is smooth and quick. I like Panther. It was stable, it booted quickly, networked well with everything I've thrown at it, played 3D games well and was just an overall solid contender.
Panther also offered a clear design definition, breaking away from the potpourri of "Aqua" design concepts put into OS X from the initial release up until Jaguar (Jony Ive really had a thing for pinstripes!). Panther paved the way for the sleek uniform design introduced in Tiger. I can admit that a "Brushed Metal" Finder does look off-putting at first, but it grows on you (and I've set "Hide Toolbar" to a Ctrl-Cmd-H keyboard shortcut for when it all gets too much).
Panther was a real defining point for the OS and it's just a shame that there are so few software options still available.
Mac OS 9 (Lives)
Installing Mac OS 9.2.2 Universal is a breeze. Mac OS 9 boots quickly, moves smoothly and feels as fast as a modern OS on this 400Mhz wonder. This is how the Pismo was meant to be used and with 320MB of RAM it feels like there is plenty of elbow room. I've installed WordPerfect 3.5e as a fully functioning (free) word processor and I'll install my copy of Photoshop 7.0 and a few other of my favourite old applications next.
For a complete trip into nostalgia, I also discovered the Internet Archive of MacAddict magazine cover CDs and the "deatomization" scanned 600dpi PDFs of every backissue! I have been getting a kick out of going through all of the old shareware, demos and all of their "Freakin' Awesome" videos and multimedia driven cover discs on the Pismo. I had a massive collection of Mac 'zines when I was a teenager. So while the other kids were bringing Sports Illustrated and surfing/skateboarding magazines to school, I was (quietly) rocking MacAddict!
Applying new Thermal Paste and Pads
To get the most out of the Pismo, I wanted to ensure it was cooling sufficiently. Gauge PRO in Mac OS 9.2.2 shows the CPU running temps range from 22°C to 30°C with Energy Saver set to Conservative. Unfortunately, I can't find any tools to read anything other than the HDD S.M.A.R.T. temperature in OS X, so I can't monitor how hot it gets with a more demanding system.
One thing to note about the Pismo's design is that it is extremely easy to work on. Pull back the two keyboard levers to lift the keyboard up and you can swap out the hard drive by simply pulling the caddy up and then removing the HDD's four mounting screws. Adding RAM requires removal of just two screws.
Pulling out the heatsink required removal of a grand total of 5 screws! (Try that on an iBook, PBG4 or a MacBook).
1. The heatsink is removed in less than two minutes and here I began cleaning off the old deteriorated thermal pad.
2. The rubber shroud around the cooling fan at the left has collected a lot of grit over the years. I cleaned this up with a toothbrush and IPA then re-adhered it inside the frame under the cooling fan. The cooling fan also received a clean out. The 16 year old thermal pad is seen here, it just crumbled in my hands. Seen out of focus at the top of the photo here is the curled up tiny shim of aluminium wedged between the CPU and the heatsink. I kept this and cleaned it up to re-use.
3. Here is the IBM PPC750 processor after a thorough clean with isopropyl alcohol.
4. A very light coat of generic-brand silver thermal paste went on here.
5. Here is the aluminium shim, flattened out, cleaned and ready to re-seat on top of the CPU. Another layer of silver thermal paste was applied to the top of this to make contact with the Heatsink.
6. Here is the heatsink cleaned, reinstalled and with a new slab of 2mm silicone thermal padding.
7. The cage is re-seated, making firm contact with the new (thicker) thermal pad.
After the re-pasting, Gauge PRO running in Mac OS 9 shows a stable running temp of 22°C. The ambient temps were around 20°C today, so that is pretty amazing really. The outside of the machine is only lightly warm to the touch.
In conclusion
As you can tell, I am very impressed with this Mac. I had this notion that anything less than 1Ghz would be unusable in my workflow, but I have quite comfortably done some writing and coding without feeling limited. It's also worth noting that the deep, concave keys and built-in palm rests feel great for typing.
Interestingly, I was able to get Mac-On-Mac easily up and going in Panther to boot instances of 10.1 and OS9 in a virtual machine environment. This revealed the speed limitations however. Where my 1.5Ghz+ PowerBooks will run this at native speed (where you would hardly notice a difference), the Pismo gave visual delays which made it feel more like an "emulated" environment (such as QEMU/VirtualPC).
The real reason I bought this PowerBook was for testing application development on a G3, in a low VRAM, non-CoreImage environment. Xcode runs (and builds apps) surprisingly well. A secondary purpose is with Coda, Transmit and MAMP installed in Tiger, I have a full MySQL/PHP/Apache stack and HTML/PHP/CSS/JS/FTP workstation for web development.
To my surprise though, typing is most enjoyable on this 'book and once I replace the battery, I will definitely want to take it out for some inspired creative writing sessions!
-AphoticD
Bonus: Here's a quick "Pismo Power" inspired icon I put together (PismoPower.png). It looks pretty in the Dock
I am very pleased to say that I have acquired a working Pismo G3 400! It is in good condition, with only a bit of scuffing and some aging on the top rubber surface.
The battery doesn't charge and the internal DVD drive is a bit flaky, but otherwise, it is a gorgeous PowerBook and one that I have always wanted since first meeting in 2001. This black, curvaceous beauty arrived with only 128MB of RAM (2x64) and surprisingly booted into Tiger off the bat. I wouldn't recommend anyone run Tiger with less than 256MB though, it gets clunky.
First up, I removed the noisy 6GB stock IDE HDD and put in a 40GB 4200rpm spinner donated from my Titanium PowerBook G4 along with a 256MB PC133 SO-DIMM surplussed from the same donor machine. Even though the Pismo RAM is PC100, the PC133 appears to clock down perfectly fine.
The next stage was to install a plethora of systems on this old road warrior. After reading @LightBulbFun's adventures in running Mac OS 8.6 on a Pismo with a home-made G4 upgrade, I thought I would give the old OS a try. Read my results on that thread if you're interested (I got OS 8.6 working, but it introduced thermal issues).
A fresh install of Tiger went on, along with all of it's updates and my favourite Tiger compatible applications. I did the same with Panther system updates and software, and then Mac OS 9. I'll put Jaguar on it next and also try out early developer previews of Mac OS X and Rhapsody just to see them in action.
Mac OS X Tiger
I can confirm that currently with 320MB of RAM, Tiger does feel "heavy" in the same way that Leopard feels heavy on any PowerBook G4. It is totally usable though, but it has a general low framerate when moving windows around and some lag when starting up anything requiring more graphical oomph than the 8MB ATI Rage Mobility 128 chip can offer (like Dashboard). I've ordered in another 512MB SODIMM, so maybe this will help. I have tried switching between Better Energy Savings/Normal/Better Performance and the difference is negligible. I don't think the 400Mhz PPC750 had a stepping feature as found in the iBook G3s.
Mac OS X Panther
Panther is beautiful. Everything is smooth and quick. I like Panther. It was stable, it booted quickly, networked well with everything I've thrown at it, played 3D games well and was just an overall solid contender.
Panther also offered a clear design definition, breaking away from the potpourri of "Aqua" design concepts put into OS X from the initial release up until Jaguar (Jony Ive really had a thing for pinstripes!). Panther paved the way for the sleek uniform design introduced in Tiger. I can admit that a "Brushed Metal" Finder does look off-putting at first, but it grows on you (and I've set "Hide Toolbar" to a Ctrl-Cmd-H keyboard shortcut for when it all gets too much).
Panther was a real defining point for the OS and it's just a shame that there are so few software options still available.
Mac OS 9 (Lives)
Installing Mac OS 9.2.2 Universal is a breeze. Mac OS 9 boots quickly, moves smoothly and feels as fast as a modern OS on this 400Mhz wonder. This is how the Pismo was meant to be used and with 320MB of RAM it feels like there is plenty of elbow room. I've installed WordPerfect 3.5e as a fully functioning (free) word processor and I'll install my copy of Photoshop 7.0 and a few other of my favourite old applications next.
For a complete trip into nostalgia, I also discovered the Internet Archive of MacAddict magazine cover CDs and the "deatomization" scanned 600dpi PDFs of every backissue! I have been getting a kick out of going through all of the old shareware, demos and all of their "Freakin' Awesome" videos and multimedia driven cover discs on the Pismo. I had a massive collection of Mac 'zines when I was a teenager. So while the other kids were bringing Sports Illustrated and surfing/skateboarding magazines to school, I was (quietly) rocking MacAddict!
Applying new Thermal Paste and Pads
To get the most out of the Pismo, I wanted to ensure it was cooling sufficiently. Gauge PRO in Mac OS 9.2.2 shows the CPU running temps range from 22°C to 30°C with Energy Saver set to Conservative. Unfortunately, I can't find any tools to read anything other than the HDD S.M.A.R.T. temperature in OS X, so I can't monitor how hot it gets with a more demanding system.
One thing to note about the Pismo's design is that it is extremely easy to work on. Pull back the two keyboard levers to lift the keyboard up and you can swap out the hard drive by simply pulling the caddy up and then removing the HDD's four mounting screws. Adding RAM requires removal of just two screws.
Pulling out the heatsink required removal of a grand total of 5 screws! (Try that on an iBook, PBG4 or a MacBook).
1. The heatsink is removed in less than two minutes and here I began cleaning off the old deteriorated thermal pad.
2. The rubber shroud around the cooling fan at the left has collected a lot of grit over the years. I cleaned this up with a toothbrush and IPA then re-adhered it inside the frame under the cooling fan. The cooling fan also received a clean out. The 16 year old thermal pad is seen here, it just crumbled in my hands. Seen out of focus at the top of the photo here is the curled up tiny shim of aluminium wedged between the CPU and the heatsink. I kept this and cleaned it up to re-use.
3. Here is the IBM PPC750 processor after a thorough clean with isopropyl alcohol.
4. A very light coat of generic-brand silver thermal paste went on here.
5. Here is the aluminium shim, flattened out, cleaned and ready to re-seat on top of the CPU. Another layer of silver thermal paste was applied to the top of this to make contact with the Heatsink.
6. Here is the heatsink cleaned, reinstalled and with a new slab of 2mm silicone thermal padding.
7. The cage is re-seated, making firm contact with the new (thicker) thermal pad.
After the re-pasting, Gauge PRO running in Mac OS 9 shows a stable running temp of 22°C. The ambient temps were around 20°C today, so that is pretty amazing really. The outside of the machine is only lightly warm to the touch.
In conclusion
As you can tell, I am very impressed with this Mac. I had this notion that anything less than 1Ghz would be unusable in my workflow, but I have quite comfortably done some writing and coding without feeling limited. It's also worth noting that the deep, concave keys and built-in palm rests feel great for typing.
Interestingly, I was able to get Mac-On-Mac easily up and going in Panther to boot instances of 10.1 and OS9 in a virtual machine environment. This revealed the speed limitations however. Where my 1.5Ghz+ PowerBooks will run this at native speed (where you would hardly notice a difference), the Pismo gave visual delays which made it feel more like an "emulated" environment (such as QEMU/VirtualPC).
The real reason I bought this PowerBook was for testing application development on a G3, in a low VRAM, non-CoreImage environment. Xcode runs (and builds apps) surprisingly well. A secondary purpose is with Coda, Transmit and MAMP installed in Tiger, I have a full MySQL/PHP/Apache stack and HTML/PHP/CSS/JS/FTP workstation for web development.
To my surprise though, typing is most enjoyable on this 'book and once I replace the battery, I will definitely want to take it out for some inspired creative writing sessions!
-AphoticD
Bonus: Here's a quick "Pismo Power" inspired icon I put together (PismoPower.png). It looks pretty in the Dock
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