Brian This Pismo is indeed an awesome machine. G3 machines especially benefit from as much RAM as you can throw at them.
I have a number of G3/G4 machines and began comparing them. Check out my article at LEM. http://lowendmac.com/ed/royal/08sr/g3-g4-benchmarks.html My 400Mhz Pismo with 1GB of RAM, beat the iBook G3 500Mhz with 384MB of RAM hands down and even the 500Mhz iMac I had with 640MB of RAM. If you can get a 500Mhz G3 card, it would also certainly boost your Pismo even more, but these things certainly have fantastic performance even compared with higher specced G3s. I would not recommend a G3 iBook as they are plagued with problems. My advice. Max the RAM. Up the processor card (a G4 upgrade is good but expensive). For about £200 you can get a bottom end PowerBook G4, a Titanium model, you could look at these 400/500/667Mhz models. It would give you a proper G4 processor, lovely widescreen and more scope to play with. Simon --- http://www.simonroyal.co.uk - Mac news, reviews, guides, upgrades, hacks and more... - http://www.nmug.org.uk - webmaster for Norwich Mac User Group - The box said requires Windows XP or better, so I bought an Apple Mac. On Nov 4 2008, Brian Troisi wrote: Hello everyone! I have a PowerBook G3 "Pismo" 400 Mhz, 384 MB RAM, 20 GB HDD, and an AirPort Card running 10.4.11 Tiger. I am more than impressed with the performance with the machine, even though it is 8 years old! But for some tasks such as playing video or even some light gaming, I notice a lot of lag, and CPU usage spikes to 100% Very Quickly, even with the most basic tasks. Sometime I will upgrade. What do you think I should do? Should I install a CPU upgrade? I have the RAM to install, and sometime I will install it (I was too afraid to lift up the processor to install RAM on the bottom of it). Or should I get a dual USB iBook G3 12"? What is more economical? If I went with the CPU upgrade for the Pismo, should I get a G3 or G4? I like watching videos and doing system tasks frequently such as copying files, and also other tasks such as gaming. Is getting a CPU upgrade more economical than getting a dual usb iBook G3? I love those Dual USB iBooks, however I get kind of scared to see that the failure rating is so high (>70%)! I feel as if something bad happened to the iBook like the logic board failing after the warranty expires, it will be almost a total waste of money (If I bought it for $200, I *might* be able to sell it for parts for like $25-50. One bad thing about the Pismo that I can never change is the poor graphics performance, but on the iBooks, they have good ATI Radeon 32 MB GPUs. What do you think is the best deal? I would probably have a budget of around $250 to Possibly $300, but leaning closer towards $200 and $250. Thank you very all much! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to Low End Mac's G-Books list, a group for those using G3 iBooks and PowerBooks (we run a separate list for G4 'Books). The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g-books?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
