Unboxing and Exploring

After much tracking number checking and eagerly waiting, my new to me iBook G4 arrived.

I know an iBook G4 was not the most reliable or easy to work on machine I could have gone with. It did seem like a fun project though. It also reminded me of college. I had an iBook G4 very briefly and an iBook G3 for a couple of semesters. The iBook I received is an 800MHZ model. It came with an Apple branded 512MB RAM stick, otherwise it appears to be stock. The seller I got this iBook from bought all of the stock of a repair shop that had gone out of business. The machine was powered on and in MacOS in the eBay listing. I did find a new old stock 1GB stick of RAM on eBay as well.

Upon installing the RAM upgrade, I began to see evidence that I was not the first person to dive into the machine. The RAM cover is missing two screws and the AirPort Extreme retention clip.

The routing of this cable may also be off. I do not recall if my other iBooks were like this.

Here was the OEM RAM upgrade before it came out.

After buttoning the iBook back up, I started an install of MacOS Leopard. Since this machine is 67MHZ shy of Leopard's CPU speed requirement, I had to perform an open firmware trick. This trick causes the CPU to temporarily present it's clock speed higher than what it actually is. A quick Google search turns up several pages detailing how to do this. This was the link that I used. https://tinyapps.org/docs/install_and_optimize_leopard_on_unsupported_macs.html.

After the install completed, I was able to get all of the software updates installed.

This is a good place to stop for this entry. So far so good. I have not experienced any kernel panics, screen issues or graphics issues.

Starting Over

I look back at everything I have written here over the years. I see lots of unfinished and half done projects. Cooling mods for PowerMacs and ancient IDEs on PowerBooks, all of which have been lost to downsizing, moves and storage unit thefts. It is wild how much things have changed over the years.

At any rate, I will leave this here.

Stay tuned!