I know nothing about hacking hardware. I've used my Tangerine Clamshell since I got it in 1999. I love the look of it, but the processor speed, the ram, the hard drive, the lack of FireWire, the screen resolution, and the lack of DVD read drive, and CD burner, are all making it harder and harder to be content with the machine.
If I were willing to pay a lot - just how supercharged a computer could I get squeezed into a Clamshell case. I'm guessing that something like a big hard drive wouldn't be too tricky, but what about the rest of the wish-list?
Thanks so much for your help.
You could buy a new 12" PowerBook and cram it into the gutted shell of your Tangerine Clam. I'd say that that would be the upper end of supercharging it. Oh yeah, are you handy with a soldering iron? You'll need to be to reconfigure the position of the ports.
Mutant_Pie
personally it would be too much hassle to get what you want. for a moderate speed boost you would be looking at an overclock to 400mhz, max out the ram by installing 512mb, install bigger and faster 5400rpm hard disk, and maybe install a cd burner or dvd drive.
i think that if you got to even hold one of the new ibooks you'd buy one instantly...
I suppose if you were truly willing to pay a lot, and you were truly interested in becoming interested in "hardware hacking", and you had, oh say, a nice little manufacturing facility at your disposal, you could, theoretically, stuff just about any modern technology you wanted into that clamshell case.
You pretty much touched on the two key obstacles:
cost, and (b) technology availability.
Fortunately, there is plenty of technology available and your unlimited budget puts all of this technology at your disposal.
I have a 466 mhz clamshell I managed to pick up for a song. So far, it's a great little machine. It came to me with 192 mb of RAM and a dying (clanking and whining) 10gb iBM Travelstar drive. Fortunately, in my toolbox, I had a spare 80gb 5400 rpm drive and a 256 mb pc133 SO-DIMM. Popped them in, installed Tiger, and it runs like a champ. While it's not as perky as my 1.5ghz 15" G4 PB, it's perky enough for filemaker and acting as a backup machine. Since I never know when I may have downtime with my G4 (I travel via mass transit every day and rely on my PB for work), it's never a bad idea to have a fall back machine. If I can snag a 12" PB G4, even an 867, that'd be a better backup machine, but for now the 466 mhz G3 iBook does the trick. It spends most of its time as a music player (hooked up to a set of G4 cube speakers in my home office).
I snagged a blueberry 300 mhz clamshell with a bad hard drive, no keyboard, and an lcd that is on its way out, and haven't gotten around to playing with it. I might gut it, or just restore it to what it used to be and sell it.
- iantm
I was going to do the same thing. I have a tangerine clamshell and a cobalt one. I was more interested in souping up the cobalt (if thats the right color, 355mhz) than anything.
What Ive done so far is get a 5400 rpm 80 gig drive in it, upped the memory to 512. The last thing I want to do without performing major surgery is grab a used tray loading combo drive on ebay price permitting. For now I use an external superdrive.
Thats about as far as I will ever get without cutting, gutting and soldering, and spending more money that I want to. The slot loading combo and superdrives would work, but then it wont be pretty anymore.
This machine is supposed to tide me over till I get the intel macbook. Then it will be the backup machine. Im very pleased with what I can get it to do, the cap of 800x600 on the display is the only hidrince as 10.4 server admin tools wont run at that resolution. Until I figure out how to get around that (if there is even a way with softare) im left with the terminal for remote admin stuff on the road. I havent even tried remote desktop on it yet, but that may have the same issue.
i disagree. i have a 933 ibook g4 that i bought when the new g4 models first came out. it's a living nightmare, maybe since it was new to the line when i got it, but i've been reading on apple's support forums and others are having the same issues as me. i prefer my wallstreet which has numerous broken parts but still runs like a dream.
i wouldn't reccomend a later ibook, but maybe an older powerbook g4 would work well. wouldn't reccomend tibook since it may be too fragile after having gotten used to the toughness of a clamshell ibook.