Archive for January, 2010

Web browsing performance of G3 iBook with a SSD

366MHz G3 iBook running OS X Panther.
533X Compact Flash card instead of a hard drive.

Best performance was found using Firefox 2 that is optimized for the PowerPC, with the NoScript extension. Version 2 of Firefox is that newest one that runs on Panther. The G3 processor is very slow with streaming video, so using NoScript to block Flash animations is key.

Showing the Yahoo homepage with ads enabled, so it’s a little slow. Slashdot is mostly text so it loads and scrolls quickly. Wisebread is a site that uses scripts & ads that give me slow load times on older computers unless NoScript is used. TV Guide site loads fast because scripts are blocked, you can see the TV Listings window is empty at the end. Allowing java would add about 20 seconds, then scrolling the listings is fine.

Apple iBook G3 booting from a CompactFlash SSD

No Hard Drive, No Fan. Silent Computing!

iBook SE PowerPC G3 – 366MHz, OS X Panther, 576 MB RAM

The boot drive is a Photofast G-Monster 533X SLC 8GB Flash Card, in a CF-IDE Hard Drive Adapter from Addonics Technologies.

If you ever wondered how fast a PowerPC Macintosh will boot from a solid state disk, this is for you.