[rescue] WTB/Advice: Mac iBook/PowerBook

[Big Endian]

>So my other dilemma is that my wife the teacher wants
>a portable Mac.  I've looked at the iBook and it would
>appear that the 12.1" with the Combo DVD/CD-RW is
>both acceptable in price (although a *little* steep) and
>will be powerful enough for several years.

Those are fun.  But for a little bit more cash you can get a Pismo 
from ebay or a refurb TiBook 400 from apple which will run OS X much 
better.

>She doesn't really need the Combo drive as much as I
>think it's neat--in fact the lowest-end one (which would
>end up at $1099 with K12 discounts) would be fine
>from a feature standpoint.  (All I care about is that it
>needs to be able to run OS/X.1)

OK... Most g3 and up powerbooks can do this, its just a matter of how 
*WELL* it works.  It will be quite slow(no 2d acceleration features 
are used on the Rage PRO/LT) on the original black g3 (wall street), 
the bronze keyboard g3 (lombard) and the "toilet seat" iBooks.  The 
66mhz bus icebooks are slow just because they have worthless (256k = 
no useful cache) caches and low memory bandwidth.  The 100mhz bus 
ones have the same cache size but less of a bandwidth issue.

>Any comments on the tradeoffs with CPU/FSB speed
>and whether I should care?  (Anything with enough
>horsepower to equal a PII/300 should be fine for what
>she's going to do with it...)

Go for the 600/100 if you can.  Quartz/Aqua is insanely dependant on 
memory bandwidth so the more you can get the better.  It helps even 
more to be able to fit window data in l2 cache but you need a 1meg 
cache for that.

>And does anyone have a used system available?  Since
>she's never going to be very mobile with it, I'm not so
>concerned about battery lifetime.  Probably want a
>G3/233 or better from what little I know, but feel free
>to tell me differently--I've always avoided Macs.

Too bad, macs are fun machines.  I would recommend a Pismo or a 
TiBook over the iceBook for most people, but in this case price is 
probably a more deciding factor than speed.

daniel
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"Fragile. Do not drop." -- Posted on a Boeing 757.