PowerBook G4 questions

Sure thing. Just keep an eye on the running temps with iStat Menus or Temperature Monitor and see how much temps increase, if at all, as you step up the processor and memory frequencies.

Another use would be to underclock an ATI GPU in a G3 or G4 portable to reduce general running temperatures and possibly increase longevity of the hardware.

On that note, there was also a G3 CPU scaling kernel extension called iCook which can change the CPU speed of a 750FX on the fly. You could for example underclock a G3 700Mhz iBook down to 300Mhz if you wanted to reduce temps and increase battery time.

Here's a direct download link for iCook v1.0 on the Wayback Machine;
https://web.archive.org/web/20140629222521/http://swieskowski.net/icook/iCook.zip
(GPL'd source and .xcodeproj files are included)

 

Maybe it’s a jenky airport card. Do you have another known good one you could swap out with to test?

 

At this point, it is silly NOT to underclock. Supplies of PPC parts are going to become scarce if not extinct. Let's face the facts here.

If something can save a PPC for a few more years, I'm all for it.

 

100% a matter of opinion, but I must disagree.

I'm all for preservation, but preservation in a reduced form of usefulness almost defeats the purpose IMO. I'm sure there are good counterexamples of this, where some chips are especially prone to failure (the discussion of graphics chips in the early Intel thread comes to mind), but (perhaps overly) generally speaking, with proper cooling, most CPUs, GPUs, etc, aren't major points of failure. I wouldn't want to handicap a machine to protect it from a failure that isn't likely in the first place.