PowerBook 5300 to replace PowerMac 6200/75

it needs an old powerbook display adapter it uses a sorta flat wideish connector, it should do color on an external monitor my 165 does thousands of colors on an external monitor. and i believe all powerbooks will do extended desktop and mirroring

The PowerBook 5300 is a nice machine one you get used to it's various shortcomings.

The more RAM it has, the better. The 5300 you are describing can do 256 GreyScale on the internal LCD and 256 Color when hooked up to an external monitor.

As for the 5300 being faster than a 6200, I do not believe the 5300 is faster. The 5300 was quite comprimised in design, and once you get it up and runing, you'll see why.

Run Mac OS 8.1 if you have it, but don't go above that unless you want to experience torture. Even 7.6.1 is a fair bit zippier than 8.1.

If you want the best performance, avoid 68K applications. If you must use them, use Connectix's Speed Doubler as that will help, as well as RamDoubler if your system has 32MB or less.

It's a nice laptop, surely a low cost one, but still has it's downsides.

Me, I loved my 5300 when I had it. Mostly because I worked at a shop and that was the first PPC Mac laptop I ever laid my eyes upon, so back then it was like a Wallstreet or Lombard. Treat it well and it will run great.

err... I'm sure if the 5300 was at 75MHz it would be faster than the 6200... surely you're aware of just how crappy the 6200-type machines are?

Anyway- I found out the seller was wrong; it's a colour 5300. But I still don't know if it's a 5300cs or 5300c... so annoying when people refuse to tell me things like this because they "don't know anything about Macintoshes" when it's PRINTED RIGHT BELOW THE SCREEN...

I think that the Powerbook is going to slower than the 6200 for the following reasons: The 5300 used a 4000 rpm hard drive, its bus speed was slower (33 vs. 37.5), and had no L2 cache (0 vs. 256K in the 6200). The motherboard in the 5300 has basically the same crappy design as the 6200

might want to check out if the seller includes a power adapter, I just picked up a 5300CE for 10 bucks at a hamfest, but in terms of power, this one's has a really strange A/C adaptor, I imagine it's another one of those parts you can only get from apple or used on e-bay? Any ideas or thoughts from anyone?

Is that right? I thought it had the same GOOD design as the PowerBook 1400 series... except with slower processors and no cache. AFAIK the 5200-6300s are the only ones to use recycled 680x0 parts in a shocking way.

If the 5300 has a better board than the 6200 I stand corrected. However, all the other factors would appear to make the Powerbook slower, right?

i believe the power adapters for these are pretty bad
and no cd drive?

. . . their reputation. I think the LEM article describing the way the motherboards work is basically BUNK!

I've checked out the DevNotes very quickly and a lot of that high and low 32 bit stuff seems like it's due to misinterpretation by the author. Granted, the "RoadApples" are limited bus width transition era machines, but there have been generations like that in the 68k era and in the PC world as well, like the original IBM PC and the 386sx machines, IIRC. Running the 8 bit I/O bus equipped 16bit 8088 processor was intended to save money, as was the 16/32 combo bus 386sx. There's nothing wrong with such an approach, especially for entry level systems like the Performas.

The 5300 has a full bus width memory subsystem running at 33Mhz and a 68030 based I/O subsystem running at 25 Mhz, IIRC. As I recall, this is identical to the 1400's architecture, what makes the 1400 superior is the CPU daughtercard connector, allowing for faster proc cards with L2 cache and G3 upgradability.

I'd be very interested in seeing some REAL benchmarked testing of the "RoadApples" for realistic "real world" conditions. I'd be willing to bet their reputation as slow machines was more due to low RAM configurations of the day than it was to architectural flaws as the LEM articles proclaim.

jt

edit: here's an article link from a recent 68kMLA thread:

http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/603v601.html

I got ahold of a 5300CE yesterday at a Hamfest for 10 bucks and there was much cackling among the salesmen who had no idea what it was...even the 'Apple Vendor' had no idea what it did, he was selling a set of five duos for 10 bucks claiming they were useless

Err... they get the job done... *cough* as long as the job involves no moving graphics or scrolling or Web access...

They're slow. Believe me, they are slooww... I work on one. But it's a nice reliable piece of junk(), and you gotta love that startup chime- pity they got boring in everything afterwards.

The 5300 and 1400 are basically the same machine (except that the 1400 has a daughtercard).

I should think that the 5300 will be slightly faster than a 6200, especially if you upgrade the HD to something more recent (though don't waste your money on anything fancy, the controller will never be able to keep up with the disk).

If the 6x00 didn't have cache, the 5300 would be the winner, hands down.

Peace,
Drew

I have a 5200 and a 5300CE, the PB is far faster. I had between 32-64 megs of ram in the PowerBook, and 48 in the Performa. The 5300 was able to run music clearly without problems. The 5200 would lag, and freeze up until the song ended skipping the whole time. I know about the messed up bus architecture on the x200 line and I beleive it, my 33mhz Duo runs most applications faster, even fat applications. Use the PB, and if you're not going to use the IR port, but off that corner to install a 3400 CD drive.

macme