G3 333 Powerbook Lombard Bronze

1

1x2biten

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I have purchased one of these notebooks and wondering what kind of track record this animal has. Are their any problems I should know about other than the dvd decoder card to make the dvds playable and readable. Is this a fairly fast/stable mac or what? What OS would be best to run on this? Has a 400mhz processor upgrade actually can take a 400 Mhz Processor. Will this cause any incompatability issues trading off a 400mhz for this 333mhz processor and is their much speed difference to make the upgrade worth while? Thanx too whoever owns one and cares to share, Bitenrat/x2biten
 
The best OS to run on your Lombard is limited not only by the machine itself but by the use that you expect from it. The original MacOS classic will run faster than MacOSX, but that isn't the unique point to consider, and again, it will depend a bit of your previous experience with different OSes and of your expected use.

Maybe you will benefit more from a RAM upgrade than from a faster processor (but think above 400MHz, look for some g3 available upgrade kits, not just replacing the CPU to a 400MHz). I prefer more a stable than a faster machine, so I wouldn't change anything which I not really needed to. These machines were built around 1999, so each one comes with its pre-owned history and present conservation state to take into account (battery, LCD, hd).

I also purchased one Lombard and use it daily since last 5 months. I never had a PPC before to experiment with, so I decided to evaluate and used it like I received, with Panther running on a pbg3 400 w/ 128MB RAM 4GB hd. After some use I upgraded to 256MB RAM and to a faster 60GB hd.
Get installed MacOSX, Yellow Dog Linux, Gentoo and OpenBSD. I didn't like YDL, maybe soon I will replace it with some of DragonFly/FreeBSD/Debian/Ubuntu. Sure each OS deserves its use. I think OpenBSD has the great performance I can extract from my Lombard, depending not only of my MacOSX ignorance but of my use: I use this machine when configuring Linux/*BSD servers (thats my job, no MacOSX server to configure yet ;~).

Working just with unixes, I didn't try the MacOS classic, but think about it.
Hope that helps some lights on the subject.
 
OS will run faster, as the man said, but as he also said, it may not be the best bet. if you stick a lot more ram in there (max it out. shouldn't cost you more than £40), then stick OSX on it. it's such a completely different os, it's modern, it's fresh, and it's stable, a true multitasking environment.
 
The last OS X supported by the Lombard is 10.3 Panther. It is also a bit more thrifty with RAM than the current 10.4 Tiger, an important consideration when your RAM maxes out at only 512 MB. I hacked Tiger onto my old upgraded BondiMac 233 G3 (500 MHz G4, 512 MB) and experienced my first kernel panic ever on that machine just yesterday. No big deal, lil' Bondi recovered fine and seems okay now. But I must say that I don't notice a lot of improvement in performance over Panther, running Tiger on my unsupported system. It is nice to have Spotlight, but Dashboard demands too much RAM to keep widgets open all the time. Still, if you feel you just have to try out the latest and greatest on your Lombard:

http://jonsharp.net/archives/2005/05/06/installing-tiger-on-lombard/
 
If you are going to run mac os x, run at least 10.2.8. I never had the fan in my Lombard turn on in earlier versions, and it would get very, very hot.
Don't bother with the DVD card/logic board in OS X. It can't use it. Use VLC instead for barely acceptable DVD play back.
Daystar has a 433 G4 upgrade that should help DVD playing a lot.
The apple 400 Mhz daughter card drops right in. It has a bigger cache too, so it is significantly faster then the 333 Mhz.
The best thing about Lombard is they are very easy to work on compared to new models.
 
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