So I’ve been spending the last couple evenings tinkering with an old Powerbook that a friend gave me. I’ve been in need of one to check out how a web site looks within Safari, Firefox, and IE on the Mac and see if I can’t figure out how to address some of the minor issues that seem to be popping up with div height/width issues.
I had to go a round about way of getting OS X.2.8 installed. My friend only had a series of upgrade CDs for the most part. So starting from 9.1 > 10 > 10.1 > 10.2 > upgrade 10.2.8. I have a 10.3 upgrade as well, but the Powerbook seems to be running pretty well as is. The main thing I wanted was a working Safari/IE environment on the Mac so I could do some experimenting.
The thing that just boggles me around the cost of technology is its lifespan/usefullness. I have no idea how expensive this current Powerbook was in its day (Its a Powerbook G2 266MHz 128 MB ram), but my friend purchased it ‘broken’ for $25 (I think). All that’s really bad abou it is that the battery is long dead and the power cable connector in the back had broken loose from the mother board and needed to be re-soldered back into place. 10.2 also seems to like to dim the screen beyond the point of being able to make out what you’re doing at start up as well for some odd reason. I discovered yesterday that I just have to hit the brightness button a couple times and WHAM! the screen suddenly blinks back on. Aside from those those few issues it seems to work pretty well.