Recycled Computing

No Money Down: The Resurrected PowerBook

- 2010.03.23

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Short link: http://bit.ly/aiwJHm

12 inch PowerBook with a working display
12" PowerBook with a working display.

Well, it has been a frantic week, but I finally have a 12" PowerBook G4 laptop up and running with a working display.

The PowerBook G4, with its compact 10.9" x 8.6" footprint, presages the current netbook craze by seven years and has been missed by Apple fans ever since it's demise. One of the complaints about the MacBook Air was that the 12.8" x 8.94" footprint was too wide. The 12" PowerBook has the smallest footprint of any PowerBook capable of running Mac OS X.*

I've always wanted one, so when the old (we have a new one) athletic director's 12" PowerBook G4 proved too much for Mr. Mike, our resident computer fixer, to bring back to life - it had a broken LCD - he gave it to me with an iBook LCD screen to "see what I could do". I tried to see if the iBook LCD would fit and when it didn't, our brave and industrious editor, Dan Knight, sent me a stripped 12" PowerBook with a working screen.

12 inch PowerBook parts
My shelf of 12" PowerBook parts.

At this point, as you will see in the accompanying photo, I had a shelf of parts. I didn't know if Dan's donor's main circuit board would work, so I took the donor apart until I reached the point where I could take out the board. I replaced the board from the original PowerBook and rebuilt the donor with the DVD drive from the original, a 160 GB hard drive I had lying around, and a 256 MB RAM stick from a spare (and non-working) Pismo PowerBook.

If you are counting RAM (128 MB on the board plus the 256 MB stick equals 384 MB), you know that I can't get Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on it, as the installer requires 512 MB. I have not spent any cash on this project yet, but if I'm going to get some memory, I may as well go whole hog and buy as much as I can. For around $50, I can max out the RAM to 1.125 GB and run Leopard (but not OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which requires an Intel-based Mac). Not too bad for a computer that almost went to the computer graveyard.

In the meantime, I'm running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on it and enjoying the experience. The 12" runs hot, so I installed Temperature Monitor on it, and so far it is staying within the proper parameters.

The other thing that you notice with the 12-inch is that the old gal is heavy. At 4-and-a-half pounds or so, no one is going to confuse it with a netbook. But if you are an elderly curmudgeon like me, you still feel that metal is better than plastic.

I look at the "Ouch Corner" (see The Apple Patient) on the original chassis and can't help but wonder what would have happened to a plastic body computer if it had to survive an impact like that. It probably would have been shipped out to the computer graveyard.

* The smallest footprint was the PowerBook 2400c, at 10.5" x 8.5" (90.1 square inches), and the runner up was the PowerBook 100, which had an 11.0" x 8.5" footprint (93.5 square inches). At 93.74 square inches, the 12" PowerBook was the third-smallest.

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