Sunday, June 11, 2006

Powerbook Chronicles - Part 1

About a year ago while in the grip of eBay fever and web surfing based procrastination (I should have been studying for an exam I think) I purchased an elderly Macintosh Powerbook computer. My reasoning for wanting a Macintosh powerbook was thus:

1: For one of my subjects at uni I had to use a Mac in the library for photoshop as these were regularly the only PC's that were vacant (Whoever designed those stupid "no button" mice has a lot to answer for). This got me intrigued in the whole Macintosh idea.

2: I was looking at an older windows laptop just because I thought it would be cool.

Surely it would be sensible to get a Macintosh laptop? Plus that way I would save money! So I won a Powerbook 1400 on eBay for about $30. After the seller eventually sent it to me I realised that I didn't particularly need it. I read a couple of articles on LEM about using this particular machine fore wireless internet, which sounded a pretty cool thing to do with such old technology. So it was back to eBay looking for a suitable 16 bit 802.11b PCMCIA card. From memory that cost me about $10 including postage. Bargain!

Next I realised that because the computer didn't come with a CD ROM (still working on that) I needed some way of getting the driver files for the wireless card which are bigger than a floppy disk (thankfully it has one of those) onto the computer. The answer came in a flash, literally, so I bought a PCMCIA Compact Flash adaptor for about $5 (I think that also included postage too) on eBay.

And that is where the project stalled for the next year...

Next installment coming soon.

2 comments:

Rebecca said...

Hi Ben,
Just remember, once you go Mac, you never go back.
I curse everytime I have to use windoze, but I manage somehow.
HooRoo
Rebecca

Ben said...

I'm still not totally convinced, although I can see why people like macs.