geek out!

...uh hum, c'est chic...

*geek boogies a bit*

Where was I? oh yeah, my mate Phil is buggering off to London to do a crash course in accountancy so he can get paid better for being a whiz at that sort of thing (which he already is). This sucks, but the other day as part of his preparations for leaving he mailed a bunch of us to ask if anyone knew of a good cheap laptop he could take with him when he goes as Fred* is a bit big to travel with.

Phil's a fellow C21st Mac-head**, but not really much of a geek (unlike, say, me) so I mailed him back and asked if something around £300 would be in the right ball park, this turned out to be a couple of hundred less than he was thinking so we set to and found him a secondhand PowerBook on eBay, a 2000 vintage "Pismo" G3 to be precise.

I know what you're thinking: a six year old laptop's going to be an utter dog right? Wrong. I just went over to instal the extra RAM he bought for it (which including the machine itself brings the total to under £300) and it's a sweet little machine. I've often read people raving about the last G3 PowerBook as the best laptop Apple ever made (high praise if you ask me) but I've never seen one myself before. Now I can see why they've such a reputation, at six years and change this thing's still a strikingly well designed and very capable little computer, it runs the exact same operating system and most of the programs that any brand new Mac you bought today does, and it even looked like its battery might still hold a charge measured in hours (fingers crossed on that, it hadn't fully charged when I came home).

So I'm all vicariously geeked out with Pip's new 'puter, and happy that he has something to keep him in touch with us all while he's awa' south in the badlands.

* see! it's not just me that does that: Fred is Phil's angle-poise style iMac
** as opposed to a preCartesian OS X Mac-head, they're a different animal altogether