Electronic goodies

Fri, 12 May 2006 08:59:39 GMT

I received a couple of toys recently:

Apple Powerbook Lombard (aka "Bronze")
- G3 @ 333 MHz (MegaHertz)
- 320 MB (Megabytes) of ram
- 6 GB (Gigabyte) hard drive
NEC DVD-RW dual layer/CD-RW (notebook drive)
1 GB of notebook memory for my Dell Inspiron 600m
512 MB of special low-profile memory for the powerbook

The NEC drive was placed into another Powerbook G3 333 MHz and I used a program called Patchburn that allows you to install a notebook DVD-RW drive into a Lombard. This is a brief definition from the patchburn website:

"PatchBurn is a tool to patch existing CD/DVD-drivers (under Mac-OS X 10.2.x) or to generate and install new device profiles (under Mac-OS 10.3.x and later)
It allows many, otherwise unsupported burners to be used directly with Mac-OS X, iTunes and DiscBurner"

Lombards were made in 1999, and only came with a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. I had to unscrew the old DVD-ROM from its tray, and screw in the new DVD-RW/CD-RW drive. There is only one downside, and that is that the faceplate does not match the powerbooks contours, but it also does not stick out. Besides that little annoyance, I am pleased! This program allows the DVD-RW to be installed into the system through OS X, and then you can use the DVD burner to burn CDs and DVDs!

The Lombard is rated to accept a maximum of 320 MB of memory... so says Apple. The memory I purchased is low-profile, and comes from Other World Computing. This memory allows you to have a total of 512 MB, and makes a considerable difference in OS X! The Powerbook reports 512 MB, and there is a noticeable difference in terms of speed and multitasking. So, an older Powerbook G3 has been given a new lease on life :)

The 1 GB of memory that was purchased for my Dell Inspiron made a huge difference, and now it speeds along without any sluggishness :) What a happy office I've got now with two apple notebooks and a dell notebook all running fast and efficiently :)

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Electronic goodies