While I was dog-sitting this past week, I was surfing the 'net with my friend Brigid's laptop. It's a fairly recent Wintel machine with reasonable specs, and it made me realize that I'd completely forgotten what web-surfing was supposed to be like.
Back in March, I started what was supposed to be a month-long experiment, doing all my computing on vintage Macs. (Prior to that, I had just been using my Mac laptops and an old iMac as a DVD player.) I hooked up an old G4 tower to use as my main machine and... somehow a month turned into more than half a year.
Don't get me wrong, the Sawtooth is a swell machine, and I love Camino as a browser, but the G4/500 with half a gig of ram was just bog slow when it encountered flash-heavy web pages. Last night I dragged the P4 2.4 back down from the attic. I feel like a quitter, but the Sawtooth just wasn't going to work without more RAM or a faster CPU.
Sadly, working with old computers is not a thing like shooting old guns.
ReplyDeleteThat depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Playing old DOS games on that 486 can be, anything involving Win 3.11, not so much. ;-)
ReplyDeleteGak.
ReplyDeleteFirewall. And Internet Explorer is a communist plot to destroy the fabric of the Free World (security-wise). Actually, Safari on Windows is pretty lousy, from a security perspective.
I understand the frustration is a Web that doesn't work, but your Mac OS 9 was about unhackable. Sigh.
(Posted via Linux/Firefox - I'm ruined for life).
Oh, the P4 uses Firefox. I haven't browsed with Exploder in years.
ReplyDelete(...and the Sawtooth was running Tiger, anyway...)
ReplyDeleteAll kinds of addictions out there, and pushers just making sure we don't turn it all off and go cold turkey. Every once in a while I admire the amount of cool knowledge and skill sets you have, then sigh and realize that you are still young and energized and don't need sleep. Go gently
ReplyDeleteHave you tried flashblock? Its a plugin for firefox that gives you a little icon in place of the flash animations themselves, you need only click on it to run them. Between that and NoScript, your browsing experience can be much, much faster. Jim.
ReplyDeleteLooking to get rid of that G4? I can put it to good use...
ReplyDeleteI have two hackintoshes now. All the advantages of commodity intel hardware (speed, cost etc...) plus I get to play with OSX.
ReplyDeleteOf course if you have an old intel machine you don't have a use for you can always install Linux and try something truely different.....
ReplyDeleteMy ole IBM T42 stinkpad runs firefox on fedora core 9 just nicely! No need for fancy schmancy glossy metrosexual macs...
ReplyDeleteArni
Firefox plus adblocker plus flashblocker. That's the only thing that keeps the internet from making me punch the screen. Faster, too.
ReplyDeleteFirefox 3 doesn't leak memory as badly as v2.
I'm cranked because the Android development tools are only compiled for MacOS/intel, not PPC. Other than that I'm content on my G4 laptop as long as it has enough RAM.
Or load up linux. My old linux machine loaded with CENTOS runs rings around my P4 1.8Mhz laptop.
ReplyDeleteOS overhead really is a bog on a Win machine.
Another +1 for blocking content.
ReplyDeleteI use adblock and noscript on my copy of firefox.
I get an icon on the webpage instead of having some damned flash hog bandwidth by trying to load itself in the background.
Go buy a Macbook Pro NOW!!!
ReplyDeleteThey are without a doubt the most awesomest computer EVAR!!!
Seriously, I just got a two year old Macbook Pro with the core duo (not core 2 duo) processor and it is quite literally the shizznit. Easily the best laptop I've ever worked on and it is my job to configure my boss's "upgrade every 14 months" Sony Viao whenever she gets it. I've also played with the latest greatest from Dell, Fujitsu and Toshiba. This MBPro is nearly as fast as my brand new iMac 24"
Go, Buy, Cuddle.
Well, Apple is offering some machines with Dual Quad Core processors...
ReplyDelete(I'm going the cheap route and just upgrading a wintel machine to dual core.)
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