i bought a powerbook g4

march 1, 2026

the year was 2018. my goat plainrock124 was not yet washed. and he had just uploaded a video in which he attempted to use a powerbook g4 in current year. that, along with another one he made sold me on buying one the first chance i could just from me looking at it

as of a few days ago i am now able to sleep knowing i have one rather than sleep wishing i had one. and since ive done a good job remembering this site has existed over the past couple months i figured i could write about what ive done with it in that time

before you read this i should mention that i did some things in this post a second time so i could get screenshots of it

'mercury'

more specifically than 'i bought a powerbook g4', i bought a tibook. more more specifically, the mercury model, which is also the very first of the g4s. the ebay listing said it was 400mhz in the description, but it also said 800mhz (or 'ivory') in the item specifics section

i was really hoping it would be the second one because i have no working laptops with a cd/dvd burner. i had some reason to be optimistic as it read '32.13 gb available' on the bottom, falling in line with the 40 and 60 gigabyte hard drive options available for the ivory models. i was a little disappointed when i clicked on 'about this mac' and found out it was a 400mhz model. although there is one thing that mercury had over all other tibooks

os 9.1 (this will end up being unimportant in the end)

all tibooks are capable of running some version of mac os 9. but only the earliest are able to run mac os 9.1 (and cheetah). after doing an installation marathon of all supported os x releases, i burned an os 9.1 cd and held down the c key only to be met with the flashing finder and question mark for about 5 seconds before it continued booting into os x.

changing the startup disk, using the option menu, and trying 9.2.x did nothing. after a few minutes of searching i found restore cds and burned them. and they worked

internet

poorly researching what i was about to buy struck me again. i only wrote that opening part a few minutes ago so it never occurred to me that i should go back and watch the video that made me want one of these in the first place in the days leading up to the purchase. it would have helped me a lot because i would have seen that even in 2018 the tibook was already having issues connecting to wifi networks with newer security protocols

no worries. i can just buy an airport extreme

..well you always have ethernet

the problem with that is i have one ethernet cable. and it is not very long

fortunately i (as in my mom) bought 3 wifi extenders a while back. one of them was in the room that holds my very small collection of things so i just unplugged it and moved it to another side of the room. a minute later i assembled this

i also harvested some of the ram out of the laptop in the top right to bring it up from 384mb to 512

at least the speeds are somewhat decent

i also installed lemmings, mactracker and palm desktop. my only working palm uses a serial port for the dock, but early g4s came equipped with an infrared port. give me a few weeks to go through macintosh garden now that i actually have an old mac to install these things to

os x

as a bonus, the restore cds also installed os x cheetah

i later upgraded it to 10.1 puma because it fits on one cd. speaking of cds, you might also notice the mac os 9.2.1 update cd. where the cd icon labeled 'mac os 9.2.1 update' under it is. apparently 9.2 and later bring speed improvements and since i got unlucky with the processor speed i was going to take what i could get

i stuck with puma for a couple days because it was the last version to only show the outlines when resizing windows. live resizing in 10.2 jaguar and up caused some very noticeable lag. then i remembered that os x shuriken existed, a collection of things i probably dont need along with performance boosts and an app store. and it was for os x tiger

it is well known that the servers for software update on tiger are still up. its probably a good thing im planning to end this because i have to come up with enough stuff to say to avoid having more images than text

i noticed the wifi extender getting hot so i moved it to be on top of a cardboard box. i also noticed that the download speeds were about 4 times faster on os x than they were on os 9. i thought it was the new setup helping but when i tried downloading something on os 9 after the new setup it was still the same speed as before

i downloaded shuriken and installed all the updates. i also ran all the scripts that were not marked (active). my benchmark for seeing any improvements was just resizing the itunes window so take it with a grain of salt, but i hope its a reverse placebo effect going on in the background

and that brings you to right now. the current now, as of now

what now

the first thing im gonna do is try out iweb. people like to use microsoft frontpage and i was close to doing the same. but now that i have something that can run it im gonna throw stuff together and see what the final result is in iweb

after that it depends on how long the hinges last. if they dont snap i might give it an ssd and more² ram

and if the hinges do break then i can take out the hard drive, give the ram back to the laptop i stole it from and wish i bought an aluminum model instead

i have not quite figured out yet what im gonna use it for long-term but i will probably think of something soon enough

i suppose the next logical step after this would be to get my hands on a firewire ipod

unimportant stuff i wanted to put in here but couldnt figure out how

i really like how the hinges suspend the display. makes having the ports on the back not so bad because i can just look underneath the screen and see which ports are what

the only worrying sign of bad hinges is that when the lid is closed the left side can be pushed down a little

another reason i was hoping for it to be the 800mhz ivory model was because if i were brute forced 10.5 leopard onto it it would at least run somewhat decently

the restore cds came with imovie 2.0.3 and itunes 1. i dont have much to say about imovie but itunes was somewhat interesting having some music and audiobook samples

fun fact. itunes, idvd, mac os 9.1 and the powerbook g4 (and probably some other stuff) all came out on the same day

you have probably seen that the gracenote database still works on old versions of itunes. you also probably figured that it would work on itunes 1. well i didnt

ok bye