What to do with a Clamshell iBook?

[adamyoshida]

I sort of, well, inadvertnetly bought an old Clamshell iBook on eBay on Christmas Day (when I'm bored, I make lowball bids on things - this was one of the rare cases where I won).

The model I got is a 300 Mhz with 96 Megs of Ram - but it also has an Airport Card (which, really, was, itself, worth the price I paid for the thing - it was a really good price).

I've got an extra 256 Meg chip laying around - will the Clamshell recognize a PC133 chip? Or will it have the same problem as Lombard and only see half the memory?

Also - am I better off putting, say, Panther on it, or should I do a clean install of OS 9.2?

I never really used OS 9.2, what's the functionality like in terms of Airport - am I going to have trouble connecting to modern networks?

As a side note, this means that - since I got back into Macs, I'll have purchased, in a single year:

1) A Powerbook 1400cs.
2) Four G3 Powerbooks (three Lombards and a Wall Street).
3) One Clamshell iBook.
4) Two dual USB iBooks.
5) Two TiBooks (a broken-down 500 Mhz and a working 667)
6) A 1 Ghz eMac.
7) A MacBook 1.83 Ghz.

I think I've got a problem. Do you folks have meetings?

 

[Quboid]

Whats your problem? If you think you bought too much stuff, you can sell me the macbook at a decent price , i couldn't answer those technical questions, but the clamshell is what attracted me to macs. I love the way they look.

 

[ChrisA]

I've finally figured out that if you have no need for a computer, then even if you get it for free it's a waste of space. So now I've got a pickup truck load of used mac gear siting outside waiting to be carted off to the city's recycle plant. I figure it's an $80,000 junk pile if you go by the new retail price.

 

[Maxwell Smart]

I've finally figured out that if you have no need for a computer, then even if you get it for free it's a waste of space. So now I've got a pickup truck load of used mac gear siting outside waiting to be carted off to the city's recycle plant. I figure it's an $80,000 junk pile if you go by the new retail price.

Before your throw that out is there any macs post-1998 in there?

Anyway, I have a clamshell and I love it. I put a 512MB PC133 stick in mine, so you should be good in that department. I would install 10.3.9 on it to get the most use out of it, though you can also install Tiger on another mac and pop the harddrive inside (that is what I did with my clamshell). Good luck and have fun!

(As a side note, I could use a screen assembly for my 667Mhz Tibook, any interest in selling the assembly from your broken down 500Mhz? Just curious )

 

[adamyoshida]

Well, it's not quite as bad as it sounds.

I actually ended up returning the MacBook after experincing some of the early problems at a serious level (the heat and the mooing, in particular). My main computer, at the moment, is actually a high-end Dell running Vista. My main Mac is the 667 TiBook with a Gig of Ram.

A lot of the rest I either resold, or gave away to people - my Mom and Dad both got Lombards (the other Lombards and the Wall Street were stripped altogether).

My sister got a dual USB iBook (the other I bought, kept for a few months, and resold - I just didn't like the form factor).

The 1400 I just bought for the heck of it. It's a nice vintage machine, and I keep it as a sort of "last resort" backup.

I'm just curious as to how functional the iBook would be under OS 9.22, perhaps as a travelling computer (even with the ram, I think it'd be dead slow in Panther, wouldn't it?).

Otherwise, given that it has an Airport Card, I figure I could get $250 for it, broken up, and use that to fund either an iTV, a new iPod, of perhaps even (selling the TiBook and my Inspiron 9400 as well) a MacBook Pro - which, of course, I should have just bought a year ago, given that it's what I wanted in the first place.

 

[adamyoshida]

Before your throw that out is there any macs post-1998 in there?

Anyway, I have a clamshell and I love it. I put a 512MB PC133 stick in mine, so you should be good in that department. I would install 10.3.9 on it to get the most use out of it, though you can also install Tiger on another mac and pop the harddrive inside (that is what I did with my clamshell). Good luck and have fun!

(As a side note, I could use a screen assembly for my 667Mhz Tibook, any interest in selling the assembly from your broken down 500Mhz? Just curious )

Alas, the 500 Mhz TiBook is what paid for the 667 Mhz one.

Actually, it worked out really well. I got the 500 Mhz from a guy who posted a plain "Broken Powerbook, $50" ad on Craigslist. When I got it home, I discovered that it had an Airport Card, a 60 Gig Hard Drive, and 1 Gig of Ram in it. I broke everything up, and sold it for a good $400+. Then, I found another guy on Craigslist looking to trade the 667 Mhz for an eMac or G4 iMac, so I bought a 1 Ghz eMac (the back-up computer of a business, practically unused - I almost kept it) for $400 and traded it for the Powerbook, minus the hard drive. It ended up costing me something like $150 in total, because the hard drive on the eMac turned out to be dying, so I bought the guy a new 80 Gig Drive (and I bought a new 60 Gig for the Powerbook).

 

[Maxwell Smart]

I'm just curious as to how functional the iBook would be under OS 9.22, perhaps as a travelling computer (even with the ram, I think it'd be dead slow in Panther, wouldn't it?).

You would be surprised, it would probably be faster in Panther than it would with OS 9.2.2. Plus as nice as the Classic Mac OS was for the time, it just can't compete with OS X . Also, I completely understand about the powerbook, I'm also always in the process of buying and selling used macs and turning profits on them

 

[Pct1theory]

yeah

well u should keep buying more macs, more macs the better, and i think u should keep os 9 on it and put in the extra ram...

btw if u don't want that working TiBook, let me know.....

___________________________________________________________________
BlackBook, C2D, 2 GB RAM, 200 GB HDD, 2.0GHz
iPod 5G (30 GB White)
HP Pavilion XL918 (Almost Dead)

 

[mBurns]

You could also set your clamshell to dual boot OS 9 and OS X so you have the best of both worlds. Games in OS 9 and regular day to day stuff in OS X. The main thing that plagues this older machines as I'm sure you know is sufficient browsers.

 

[adamyoshida]

You could also set your clamshell to dual boot OS 9 and OS X so you have the best of both worlds. Games in OS 9 and regular day to day stuff in OS X. The main thing that plagues this older machines as I'm sure you know is sufficient browsers.

Yeah, but I'd have to swap out the drive for a bigger one then. And, looking at ifixit, swapping the hard drives looks like a pain (though, if I could do it on an eMac...).