a techie question re power book

[lobelia321]

A colleague of mine is selling a Powerbook for 450 pounds. Can anyone tell me whether this is a good deal? Or whether it is more worthwhile to save up and get an ibook?

Here are the specs:

The powerbook is  about 18 months old.  It has a 12inch screen,  
1.1Ghz G4 Power PC processor and 512 mb of RAM and a 40Gb harddrive.  
It has a Superdrive -  CD R and RW writer and DVD player.  It's ready  
for internet - either dial-up (via telephone line) or braodband (via  
ethernet port).  It  comes with a bag, an Apple optical mouse,  
adaptor to link to a data projects for showing slides etc.  All I  
need to do to make it ready is do a clean reinstall of the operating  
system to remove all my old programmes, documents etc and put it back  
to its original state.  I'll install for you the latest MacOSX 10.4
(Tiger), iLife (which includes iTunes, iMovie, IPhoto) and iWork  
(which includes a DTP programme called Pages and an excellent slide  
and presentation programme called Keynote).

Comments

[msilverstar]

PowerBooks are actually more powerful than iBooks, though they weigh a little more.

This looks like a very sweet machine, nice setup with the newest OS.

The one thing it's missing is a wireless AirPort card (aka 802.11) If you want to buy one, have the friend install it, as it's kinda tricky.

Just realized another thing, it doesn't have MS Word or Excel or PowerPoint, you'd have to buy the MS Office package. Academic discounts are really good though.

[celiaka.livejournal.com]

If you have an apple shop anywhere near you, they will install the airport card for you. I just fits in a slot under the keyboard.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

What is an airport card exactly???

[celiaka.livejournal.com]

It's a little card that when installed in your apple means that it can pick up wireless internet.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Wow. *drools*

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you! This is so helpful. I am clueless myself. I have Word on my imac; could I just transfer it? And my Photoshop and PageMill et cetera? And is this a good price? 450 pounds is 800 dollars. But then these things tend to be cheaper in the US, so that's probably no yardstick.

[msilverstar]

If you have Mac OS X Word, that's good. You probably have the older one though :-( They don't even sell PageMill any more.

450 pounds is a little high -- take a look at eBay for pricing.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

But can't I upload my old OS onto the powerbook and just override OSX?

[msilverstar]

Not really. You'll be able to use Mac OS 9 either booting or as "Classic" in emulation mode. But the machine is not designed for that. Also, your browser and some of your other programs aren't supported any more and will stop working pretty soon. Switching to Mac OS X is a good idea, it finally works properly.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Does this mean that on my present imac (OS 8.6) my browser etc. won't work any more soon??? AAAAACK.

[msilverstar]

the browser won't stop working, but a lot of sites won't work with it.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

60 percent of sites I visit these days I can't see. It pisses me off mightily but I refuse to bow to international commercialdom wot always changes their sites to be whizzy-dizzy and too bad, they just don't get my custom. *farts in their general direction*

I love me my plain and simple no-gimmicks pure html sites! None of this plug-in tomfoolery.

*tries to stop ranting but could go on for hours*

[msilverstar]

Hah! Both of my sites (work and fandom) are clean and readable :-)

But sometimes it's just a mistake rather than gimmickery. If you get Mac OS X, you also get a nice, free, OPEN-SOURCE browser (Firefox) which has a popup-ad killer. Thoroughly user-focused :-)